


and you thought the lions were bad

by kindclaws



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Dark!Clarke, F/M, Gen, very VERY loosely inspired by Daredevil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2015-07-05
Packaged: 2018-04-07 19:51:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4275858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindclaws/pseuds/kindclaws
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here is a secret about Clarke that only Raven knows: Clarke died two months ago.<br/>Raven's not even sure Clarke is aware that this happened.</p><p>or, On the morning of Clarke's twenty-sixth birthday, the police fish the body of another vigilante out of the river by her apartment. It's the second one this month.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and you thought the lions were bad

**Author's Note:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS: Canon levels of violence, minor character death, attempted murder, actual murder, suffocation, probably inaccurate depictions of legal systems, ableist language used towards oneself in low moments, implied but not described torture. 
> 
> Hope I got everything - feel free to tell me if you think anything else should have been tagged. Title from Bastille's Daniel In The Den. Enjoy!

 

 

 _And you thought the lions were bad,_  
_Well they tried to kill my brothers_  
_And for every king that died,_  
_Oh they would crown another._

 

 

 

On the morning of Clarke's twenty-sixth birthday, the police fish the body of another vigilante out of the river by her apartment. It's the second one this month.

It's not yet eleven am and Clarke is already tired, the kind of exhaustion that sinks in bone-deep and never really leaves, not even on the rare nights she manages to get more than five or six hours of sleep. Her whole body aches, softly enough that she can ignore it given enough distraction, but enough that abrupt movements send waves of dull pain through her joints. And yet, Clarke can't bring herself to hate it, or regret its causes. In another day or two, she'll be back at it, she knows, driving herself to the limit and then some. She likes the aches in some twisted, grudging way. They keep her present.

Half a dozen patients look up when she walks into the waiting room and leans against the wall, all hoping it'll be their name she's here to call next. Clarke doesn't make eye contact with them, instead scanning over the patient information forms in her hands. Whoever filled this out has _terrible_ handwriting.

The tv in the waiting room is always either playing through an extensive list of Air Bud movies or on the local news. Had today been a designated dog-plays-basketball-day, Clarke might not have heard about the story until noon - when she usually takes a break from peering down people's reddened throats to wolf down a soggy sandwich with Jackson while they both dance around the topic of her mother. But today is not a dog-plays-basketball-day. It's a news day.

The volume isn't muted but it's quiet enough that a vicious bout of coughing that suddenly overtakes the woman by the door nearly drowns out the voice of the newscaster. But Clarke still picks up the words, the newscasters forced somber tone.

She looks up from the forms in her hands, raises one blonde eyebrow at the tv in the corner. There's blurry video footage accompanying the story - three police cruisers parked at the side of the road, half a dozen people standing by the river's shore and shivering with their hands in their pockets as a rescue crew pulls the costumed body out. None of them look to be in any hurry. There's no reason to be. The body is laid out on the ground, limp and compliant, and the ambulance hasn't bothered to turn its sirens on.

One of the cops steps forward, tugs the mask off the body. Long dark hair clings to the sides of the corpse's face, but the video is too poor quality for Clarke to make out much more than that. She doesn't need to. The purple and gold costume tells her exactly who they found floating face-down in the water.

The video footage ends, and they cut back to the reporter with the serious voice, who is frowning appropriately at what he calls 'tragic, tragic news'. The tv then shows the picture of a young woman with a coy smile and long brown hair - apparently having identified the vigilante's real identity. _Roma Surestine_. Has a ring to it.

Clarke can tell by the photo they've chosen - Roma is wearing a low-cut tank top and happily displaying the blurred out bottle of vodka in her hand - that they're once again going for the 'out of control young person taking teenage rebellion too far' angle. That's what they did for the last few bodies, too.

"We'll update you on this story after 2 pm this afternoon, when chief of police Shumway is scheduled to hold a press conference to talk about the recent string of misfortune that has befallen the city's so called 'vigilantes'. Inside sources say Shumway is urging wayward citizens to put away their masks and costumes and leave justice to the professionals. More on this later. For now, we take you to the launch of up and coming energy tycoon Cage Wallace..."

Clarke doesn't need to listen anymore. She reaches over the receptionist's counter for the remote and changes the channel to some goofy looking cartoon. It's not Air Bud, but it'll do. She manages to finally decipher the name on the patient information forms, and tries to put the death out of her mind as she shines a flashlight into her patient's eyes and takes notes as he describes his recent migraines. He recites all the textbook symptoms like a grocery list. Asks for something strong for the pain.

There are dark circles under his eyes despite the coffee Clarke can smell on his breath when she leans in close, and he winced when he sat down. Clarke flips through his medical history again and frowns when she sees something unusual for a tiny walk-in clinic.

"You were shot four weeks ago?" Clarke asks, looking up from the paper and eyeing her patient again. He smiles weakly. His skin looks sallow under the fluorescent lighting.  
  
"Dangers of the job," he says lightly. "I'm a cop."  
  
Clarke presses her lips together and looks away, trying to hide the displeasure his words bring up in her, but he catches on nonetheless.

"Do you have a problem with that?" he asks challengingly.  
  
"Not at all," Clarke lies smoothly, setting the file down and reaching her hands towards his shirt. "May I see how it's healing?"  
  
He lifts up his shirt for her, wincing only slightly at the movement. He opens his mouth like he's about to make a comment, then closes it. Clarke allows herself a tiny smirk. The bullet wound seems to be healing just fine. There are other scars on his torso, some faded and pale against dark skin, some fresher. She doesn't ask about them. More dangers of the job, she supposes.

After a moment of hesitation, Clarke removes her hands, tugs one glove off a finger at a time. The cop watches her hands with a glimmer of interest in his dark eyes, doesn't look away as she presses the bare hand to his torso again and feels along the curve of a rib for tenderness.

"This is the weirdest foreplay I've ever experienced," he says after a moment. Clarke almost slaps him, but stops herself because she needs this job, it won't do her any good to come under scrutiny from the police, and she's distracted by the warm flush of skin under her fingertips.  
  
"Shh," she says absently, frowning and tracing her hand closer to the healing wound. She closes her eyes, feels muscles jump under her palm. There is a knot under the wound, a spiderweb tangle of internal scar tissue and frayed veins. Clarke doesn't need to have her eyes open to know her patient is wincing at her touch. She removes her hand, opens her eyes.

"So how long do I have left to live, doc?" the cop asks as she pulls his shirt down for him and disposes of her gloves for a new pair. Her side tingles in pain, and she ignores it.  
  
"You'll survive," Clarke responds dryly. She prints him a prescription for weak pain meds, hardly stronger than something he could buy in a corner drugstore. He groans as he slides off her examination table and takes the papers she shoves in his hands.  
  
"Good to hear," he says. "Migraines are a boring way to die."  
  
"Because a boring death is obviously the worst thing that could happen to someone," Clarke mutters. The patient chuckles and heads for the door. Clarke squints once more at his information forms to remind herself of his name. "Oh, and Officer Blake?"  
  
Her patient stills, one hand on the doorknob. He turns.

"Yes?"  
  
"I hope you have a good reason for lying about the migraines," Clarke says casually. Something akin to anger flashes across his face before he looks appropriately embarrassed. Blake raises the prescription awkwardly.  
  
"My partner won't let me go back in the field until I stop wincing," he says. "And I'm sick of sitting on my ass. Didn't think you'd catch on."  
  
"Hmm," Clarke says, raising an unimpressed eyebrow. "As someone who swore the Hippocratic Oath, it's my responsibility to tell you to let the wound heal at its own pace."  
  
"Yeah, yeah," Blake says, raising his free hand in a mocking salute and walking out the door. Clarke shakes her head, wipes down the examination table. When she's sure he's not going to run back in and give her a sassy parting comment, she pulls her shirt up and examines the small hole that's opened up on her side. She presses her lips together in displeasure, pokes at it with disinfectant. By the time she goes to call her next patient in, it's already sealed.

Someone's switched the tv in the waiting room back to the news, and they're replaying the vigilante story again. Clarke grits her teeth, flickers through the channels until she finds some vapid reality drama, and considers hiding the remote in the break room's microwave.  
  
Later that day, Jackson catches her in-between patients - she's in a bad mood because she had to explain to some frat boy exactly why it was a bad idea to skate down the railing of his staircase, and he _wouldn't_ _get it_. It takes her a long moment to realize what Jackson's pressing into her hands.

"Happy birthday, Clarke," Jackson says. "I was going to buy you a cake this morning too, but the police closed off a few roads for that body they found and the detours made me late."  
  
"That's all right," Clarke says, so quietly she can barely hear herself, staring down at the package in her hands. It's neatly covered in light blue wrapping paper, a glittery bow on top. Some of the sparkles rub off onto her fingers and don't come off. The looping handwriting addressing it to her is not Jackson's. Funny, Clarke's heard all the jokes about doctors having terrible writing, but her mother's calligraphy is nicer than anyone else's Clarke knows. "Thanks, Jackson. Really."  
  
"I know it's not my place to pry, but..." Jackson trails off, looking down the hall where the receptionist is clearly trying to eavesdrop and pick up some gossip for later. He lowers his voice, his brown eyes wide and sad as he looks at Clarke. "Give her a chance, Clarke. She's really trying to make it up to you."  
  
"Yeah," Clarke says, and goes back into her room before Jackson can say anything more. She sets the package down by her backpack, out of sight, but not inside of it because she hasn't yet decided if she isn't just going to throw it into a dumpster on her way home. She picks up a styrofoam cup of instant coffee gone cold, and stares out the window as she drinks it. From here she has a view of the river they pulled Roma Surestine out of.  
  
The police blockade is gone now. Of course. Clarke finishes her lukewarm coffee, tries rubbing off all the glitter that's still stuck to her hands, and gives up.

"Fuck - "

 

 

  
  
" - this. Fuck everything," she mutters later that day.

The rational part of Clarke's brain is telling her that she should crawl into bed and pull up Netflix and get drunk and fall asleep on Raven's stomach. It's her birthday. She should treat herself.

But she feels the restlessness in her blood even before she gets home, feels her eyes drift towards every dark alleyway she walks past. Clarke might have an addiction. Maybe. And she knows, as she puts the birthday present from her mother on the top shelf of her bookcase where she won't have to look at it for a while, that she'll be out on the streets tonight no matter what halfhearted promises she makes to herself now.

She hears Raven coming down the hall as she's stitching up her mask. Raven's footsteps are distinctive - her right foot stepping confidently, her left dragging behind like an afterthought. Clarke sets down her mask and needle in her lap, frowns. She briefly considers stuffing the mask under the couch cushions so Raven doesn't see, but then, her friend has always been to tell when Clarke's lying.

Clarke picks halfheartedly at her stitches as Raven's key turns in the lock. The heavy thud of a backpack filled with robotics prototypes doesn't startle her, but Raven's groan does.

"You okay?" Clarke asks, looking her friend from head to toe.  
  
"Fine," Raven replies, but her voice is a little tight as she leans her crutches against the opposite wall and shrugs off her jacket while balancing her weight on her good leg. "So I hear it's someone's birthday, and they totally don't deserve my company since they ate all my peach yogurt, but I'm gonna hang out with them anyway because I'm just that damn nice."  
  
Clarke can't resist the smile that blooms on her lips as Raven hobbles to the couch and plops down at the other end, throwing her head back against the cushions and sighing. Her whole body seems to deflate as she does, and Clarke almost reaches out to touch Raven's wrist to see if she's okay. Clarke thinks she's lost weight since the accident - and sleep. She's heard the soft click-click of tools against metal late into many nights and found Raven staring intently at her robots whenever she goes for a midnight snack.

But Raven pulls her wrist away just as Clarke reaches for it, like she already knows her intention.

"None of that," Raven snaps. "We talked about privacy and personal bubbles and shit, remember Clarke? Don't do the thing."  
  
"You'd be dead if I didn't do the thing," Clarke argues. "It's the only way I can make sure you're eating and resting and yelling enough."  
  
"You're putting yelling on the same level of survival needs as food and sleep?" Raven asks.  
  
"Yeah," Clarke says. "For you, at least. You're like a plant, except plants need sunlight and you need... Yelling. At incompetent people. Just let me do the thing."  
  
"You're not doing the thing."  
  
Clarke sighs, tilts her head back against the cushions like Raven, and traces her friend's profile mournfully. Raven turns, sticks her tongue out.

"Don't make fun of me," Clarke complains plaintively. "I'm tired."  
  
Raven's face immediately softens and she opens up her arms, offering comfort.

"Long day, huh?" she asks. "Did you look at the news?"  
  
Clarke nods, sets aside her mask and sewing stuff and moves to rest her head in Raven's lap. But Raven has stiffened, staring at a spot beyond Clarke. The mask lies innocently in view, the needle still half-sticking out of it, the tear by Clarke's left cheek still only partially repaired. This close, Clarke can pick up the change in Raven's breathing, the angry huff she lets out.

"Not tonight," Raven says flatly, glowering at Clarke. "Especially not tonight. Not only is it your goddamn birthday - can't you let yourself be normal for once? - you saw what happened to Roma!"  
  
Clarke groans, rubs the heel of her palms into her eyes. Sometimes she wishes Raven were a little less of a hurricane, and then she immediately hates herself for the thought, because if Raven wasn't so strong she never would have lived this long, nor would she be _Raven_ , and Clarke can't imagine not having her by her side.

"Raven, please-"  
  
"No, I'm not fucking around! I told you to wait until I could come out with you, and you never fucking listen!"  
  
The silence that follows after Raven's outburst seems even louder. Clarke can hear every trembling pulse of rage in Raven's breaths, can hear the pipes in their walls rattling as someone in the apartment upstairs flushes the toilet, can hear sirens wailing a block away. She stares at a fixed spot on the ratty couch by Raven's upper arm, unable to look her in the eye.

They've had variations of this argument since the accident, but Clarke thinks tonight it's the worst, because she really needs her friend now. They're going in circles with this fight, it's all they've been doing lately. Neither of them has been willing to say aloud that there's a chance that Raven will never be ready to come out with Clarke, and that's driven them to an awkward, painful standstill.

"I'm sorry, Raven," Clarke says softly. "But I have a duty."  
  
She picks up her mask again and starts sewing up the tear in her cheek without looking at Raven. Still, she can sense the other girl's cold anger, knows that when Raven leans forward and reaches for the tv remote that she's already shoved her fury away so she can pretend she doesn't care if Clarke's body is the one they fish out of the river tomorrow morning.

Clarke finishes sewing, stands and retrieves a beer bottle from the fridge. It's super cheap and weak, but she'd like to be relatively sober when she goes out later, so it'll do. She cracks it open and takes one swig before holding it out in Raven's direction. They pass it back and forth, refusing to look at each other, until they've finished the entire bottle and silent tears are coursing down Raven's cheeks.

By that time it's already dark outside - the days are getting shorter as they head into autumn, and Clarke gets less and less sleep the longer she spends walking the nights. She dresses quickly, efficiently. Black cargo pants, the light pair of boots she could find with steel toe tips, a tight black shirt. The mask. She wraps her knuckles, but leaves her fingertips bare. She needs skin-to-skin contact. There's a taser in the bottom drawer that she tucks into her belt. She doesn't use it often, but it's nice having it there as a backup. Another reason she likes it is because many a criminal has scoffed when they see her with it – a woman's weapon for a woman of a vigilante – one of them had sneered, right before she had shown him exactly what a woman's weapon was capable of.  
  
The last thing she does is put on lipstick. Blood-red. Here's a life tip: Fistfights are so much more exhilarating with red lipstick.

Raven is staring vacantly in the vague direction of the tv when Clarke walks back into the living room, already dressed for her outing. Clarke reaches for her hand, hesitates, and then sets it down on Raven's shoulder where her fingers brush only the cotton of Raven's shirt.

"Be safe," Raven croaks, so quietly Clarke isn't sure she was meant to hear. She nods, because her voice doesn't seem to be working right now, and shoves up the window that leads to the fire escape. And then she is gone - a ghost on the same wind that carries the howl of sirens across the city and the barking of stray dogs and the soft, inaudible cries of homeless teens under the bridge who have no better lullaby than their sorrow. The city's shadows hold a lot of secrets.

 

 

Here is a secret about Clarke that only Raven knows: Clarke died two months ago.

Raven's not even sure Clarke is aware that this happened.

 

 

 

Clarke returns early into the morning, exhausted, bloody. She dumps a twisted mess of metal on the kitchen table in front of Raven.

"The hell is this?"  
  
"You're the genius," Clarke says as she goes over to the fridge and pulls out leftovers to reheat. The only source of light is the lamp shining down on Raven's notebook as she sketches blueprints, and in the darkness she could almost pass for an ordinary teenage girl rummaging for a midnight snack. But then she limps towards the table and when she sits down across from Raven the lamp illuminates a nasty head wound that's drenched half of her blonde hair scarlet.  
  
Raven reaches out across the table, lays her hand palm up. Clarke stills in the middle of raising a fork of noodles up to her mouth. The noodles quiver, then slip off the tings, landing with a plop in her plate one at a time.

"No," Clarke says, pushing Raven's hand away with her elbow.  
  
"You wanted to do the thing earlier. Just do it," Raven insists, shoving her hand back at Clarke and waving it around.  
  
"I wasn't beat up earlier," Clarke says. "Now I am."  
  
"We both know you can't go to work like that tomorrow," Raven says, and Clarke hates that she's right. "I'm working from home, no one will look at me weird if I'm covered in bruises."

Clarke just sighs, like the weight of the whole world is on her shoulders and she's aching to lessen the load but she's terrified of the consequences - because it always comes down to this, doesn't it? Always. The people she loves getting hurt so Clarke can heal, can keep fighting another day.

She brushes one fingertip against Raven's outstretched palm, withdraws it as soon as bruises bloom up Raven's forearms while Clarke's begin to fade and a long slash above Raven's ear begins to drip blood. A droplet splatters across Raven's half-sketched prototypes and the mechanic swears, wiping it off with her sleeve. It still leaves a rusty stain.

"I'm sorry," Clarke whispers.  
  
"Don't be," Raven says through gritted teeth, pressing her other hand to her head. "This is the only way I can help while I'm crippled, isn't it?"  
  
Clarke is silent for a moment, and then her head turns towards the lump of metal she's dumped on the table.  
  
"Can you use that for anything?" she asks tiredly.  
  
"Yeah," Raven says after a long pause. She pats the leg that won't obey her with one hand. "It'll do just - "

 

 

  
  
" - Fine," Bellamy snaps into the cell phone he's holding to his ear. "Leave the paperwork on my desk, I'll do it later." His caller hangs up without ceremony, and he glares at his hand for a moment before turning his attention to the task at hand.

The church by the precinct is a dark, lonely thing. It's a strange tendency of Catholicism to take twisted pleasure in their own misery, in insisting that they are more guilty and pious and suffering than everyone else. Stone walls stained by years of rain and wind seem to shrink under the surrounding skyscrapers, all filled with tiny busy people in identical cubicles. They arrive in the morning, sit down at their desks, get up as the sun starts setting over the jagged skyline and go straight to the bars.

The church is forgotten.

Bellamy looks down at his shoes, scuffs his heel against a darkened patch of discarded bubblegum on the sidewalk, pressed flat under the soles of all those tiny busy people. There seems to be a lot of gum in front of the church. Or maybe that's Bellamy's own disdain affecting his perception.

He doesn't have anything to do today. He's still not allowed to come into the precinct until he gets field approval, and for some reason his higher-ups are dragging their feet. Bellamy could, potentially, count all the patches of bubblegum in front of the church, and then count all the patches on some other section of sidewalk, and compare. Maybe he could get Octavia to write an article about it. She's always complaining about her editor's ideas of spreads, anyway.

With one last kick at the bubblegum, he pushes the gate to the church open with one hand and walks up the steps. The door is closed. He hesitates, and then opens it anyway. Inside, his footsteps echo in the emptiness like gunshots. Like the same gunshots that tore through his side a month ago and left him gasping up at a night sky while the traffickers he'd been trying to catch got away.

"Morning service already ended."  
  
Bellamy turns to find a man dressed in black robes regarding him seriously. He's younger than he'd expect a priest to be, though there are touches of gray at each temple.

"That's okay," Bellamy says quietly. "I probably wouldn't know what to do during it anyway."  
  
The priest is unnerving him slightly. Looking straight through him. Bellamy wonders if he has 'NOT RELIGIOUS' written on his forehead in huge letters. It wouldn't be the first time that he's woken up with doodles on his face, but it would be the first since college, or since Octavia moved out.

"I am Father Kane. Can I help you with something else?"  
  
"No, it's all right," Bellamy says. His tongue flickers out to wet his suddenly dry and cracking lips. Then, "Well, maybe. Father Kane, sir. Catholics do confession, right?"

"Yes," Kane says seriously. "Do you have something to confess?"  
  
Bellamy is silent for a moment. He thinks of the bubblegum on the sidewalk outside, of the way he jumps whenever he wakes up in the middle of the night to hear his floorboards creaking, of the pain in his side that's faded a little with the visit to the pretty blonde doctor but not nearly enough.

"Not exactly," Bellamy says finally. "I guess I just... Need someone to - "

 

 

  
  
" - Listen," Raven remembers saying to her ceiling, her words slurred with anesthetic. "She never fucking listens."

The night Clarke died was the night after Raven finally came home from the hospital, only half-weaned off pain medications and still trying to wrap her mind around the foot that lay uselessly at the end of her left leg and wouldn't obey her. She was lying awake in bed, eyes tracing the water stains on her bedroom ceiling as she wondered if it would have been better if Murphy killed her.

Then she heard the crash on the fire escape.

"Clarke!" Raven had yelled out, sitting up in bed and staring towards the thin crack of light where her door didn't quite meet the frame. "Clarke!"  
  
When she'd finally found the strength - and the crutches - necessary to make it to the living room, she found Clarke bleeding out on the fire escape, flushed bruises around her neck, multiple stab wounds in her stomach, white bone poking through the skin of one arm. Clarke died that night.

Raven's not talking metaphorically. Her business is not with the intricacies of the English language. It's with yes or no, with metal and math and quantifiable things.

Clarke's lungs stopped breathing and her heart stopped beating and fifteen minutes passed while Raven slumped against the red brick of their apartment and screamed silently, her spine and her heart in mutual agony. And then Clarke had opened her eyes and turned her head towards Raven, and she had smiled as she lifted the hand that wasn't completely shattered and started twirling it like a composer in front of an orchestra. Her blood had bubbled and then solidified, crimson melting to a rusted brown to pale flesh until she was whole again.

Raven will never forget that smile.

The next morning Murphy's broken body was plastered all over the news. The police called it an unfortunate accident. Clarke sat demurely at the kitchen table and ate cereal in silence.

 

 

  
  
Clarke sometimes wonders if it was her childhood that's turned her into who she is now.

She figures most twenty-six year olds don't spend their nights running around the city punching anyone more immoral than them. Well, some do - vigilantism has been on the rise in the last few years, but most of them don't last long. Well-meaning kids who take a wrong step on the way to justice and have their backs broken over the knees of crime lords, have their bodies tossed into the river as a warning to everyone else. Shut up. Look straight ahead when you walk down the street. If you hear something you shouldn't have, forget.

Clarke is one of the rare ones who has survived several years. She attributes that part of who she is to her father. He never did let her give up on an unfinished goal.

The rest of her, well, that must be her mother's fault.

Eighteen years of sitting with her hands in her lap, a vapid pink smile on her lips, a back so straight her father could have used it as a ruler to draft blueprints. Eighteen years of pouring tea for business associates, polite one-word answers when spoken to, her mother's eyes urging her to brag about medical school from across the rooms. Eighteen years of staying still and being quiet and banging her head against the ceiling of her mother's expectations.

It was enough to drive anyone to madness. Clarke thinks it's a miracle she waited as long as she did to start slamming her fist into her obstacles.

Someone should give her an award for that.

 

 

  
  
Funnily enough, she gets 'Employee of the Month' at the clinic. Clarke props the card up against the window of her room and stares at it while she drinks the third cup of coffee that morning with her left hand, because today her side hurts too much for her to lift up her right arm.

From the card, her gaze drifts up. It's raining outside, but even through the raindrops rolling down the window she can see the blurry outline of the river. It's always the damned river. Clarke wakes up gasping sometimes, convinced her mouth is full of that dark, polluted water.

She presses one hand against her bruised side, winces. She never takes enough of her patients' pain that they realize, but somehow she's still gotten a reputation for being the best doctor in the clinic. Clarke doesn't take her gloves off for anyone that day. She has to be more -

 

 

  
  
"Careful," an old woman with a pleasant, toothy smile warns Bellamy as he nearly trips getting off the subway. He returns her smile stiffly and heads for the stairs. Once he's on the street and in range of cell towers, his phone vibrates in his pocket. He pulls it out and finds three missed calls from Lincoln.

He calls back, huddles under a nearby store awning while the phone rings in his ear because he forgot his umbrella today.

"Bellamy?" Lincoln answers. He sounds out of breath. Lincoln is built like a fucking tank. He never sounds out of breath.  
  
"Yeah it's me," Bellamy responds. "What's up?"  
  
"Octavia's missing."  
  
Bellamy goes cold, and it's not just the raindrops that are sliding down the back of his neck and soaking the collar of his shirt. In this city, a lot of people go missing. Bellamy knows, because they have a board of blurry black-and-white portraits up at the precinct. Every Monday, Fox stands up on a chair, wobbling a little in her high heels, and starts taking down the ones that have been up there for months to make room for the new ones that are always going up.

They hardly ever find anyone.

 

 

 

Clarke is very good at finding things. She's a spider. _Itsy bitsy spider, climbed up the watersprout._

She's not climbing up any watersprouts, but she is clinging to a grid of metal rafters in the ceiling of a sketchy harbourfront warehouse, so that should still qualify her for spider status.

All her senses are on high alert. She can hear the rain pattering on the metal paneling of the roof, so loudly that it almost drowns out the pounding of four heartbeats. There is dust on the rafters. She is worried her fingers will slip, and she will fall to the floor before she is ready. Clarke is waiting for the right moment. Ideally she would rush right in to save the hostage duct-taped to a chair, head hanging limply as two men with bleeding knuckles ask questions that don't have answers.

But this is not an ideal world, and Clarke has to wait. She is a predator, an intelligent one. These men have wandered into her web, them and the one they answer to, and so she will destroy them, but first she keeps crawling along the rafters, one hand sliding along the dusty metal at a time, followed by a foot silently dragging along.

By the time the hostage starts sobbing, Clarke is right above them. The man on the right slams his fist into his prisoner's stomach, and Clarke decides she will take him down first. She hangs from the rafter for a moment, frozen like a raindrop right before it gathers enough weight to fall, and then drops.

They put up a fight, they always do, but Clarke's fingers find their faces and exposed throats and every blow they deal to her she returns two-fold, until they lie on the ground groaning with both their own injuries and the ones that were meant for her. She makes certain she's all in one piece before approaching the hostage.

Clarke's found a lot of broken people. Men and women who couldn't take the pressure.

But this woman, this woman locks eyes with Clarke and bares blood-stained teeth even though her right eye's swollen to the size of a peach and her nose is dripping blood all over her chest. Clarke likes her. She reaches out a hand to touch the woman's cheek and they both shudder as the worst of her injuries melt to Clarke. As the swelling on the woman's black eye goes down, she cracks it open and looks at Clarke with a mixture of gratitude and wariness.

"Holy shit."  
  
"Yeah, that happens," Clarke says.  
  
"Don't think I've seen you on the news before," the woman says while Clarke bends down and starts tearing at the duct tape that binds her to the chair. It's difficult work because Clarke's left hand is swelled and throbbing where the interrogators broke several of the woman's fingers.  
  
"That's because my kind tend to show up on the news only when we're dead," Clarke responds shortly.  
  
"Sorry about that," the woman says. She groans when Clarke frees her hands, raising them in front of her and flexing each finger with a grimace.  
  
"Not your fault," Clarke says flatly, and she thinks that'll be the end of the conversation, but it's not. She helps the woman to the nearest intersection, holds her up whenever her shaking legs threaten to collapse. Streetlights flicker above their heads and a rat scurries away at their approach. A single car speeds past, gone too quickly for them to wave it down. The scent of rain is overpowered by the smell of piss, but this is nothing new.  
  
It was the first thing Clarke noticed when she and her mother moved here after Jake Griffin's death (murder). She keeps hoping she'll stop noticing it eventually, like she no longer notices the smoke that curls up the fire escape from the woman in the apartment underneath them.

"So do you have a cool superhero name I can call you?" the woman asks. Clarke doesn't. Partially because all of Raven's suggestions have been lame, partially because any vigilante who starts getting a reputation ends up in the river sooner or later. She shakes her head. "That's a shame. I'll come up with something for you."

"I'd really rather you didn't."  
  
They fall silent and Clarke thinks of the unconscious men in the warehouse. She might go back to have at them a second time. She's in the mood to fight until she's exhausted. If she shows up on the fire escape still in good condition, Raven starts yelling at her again. But if she shows up bloody and swaying, Raven's worry surpasses her anger and then Clarke gets to lie on the couch and focus on the cool touch of a damp towel cleaning away the night's blood and grime.  
  
Raven ends up yelling at her anyway once she's better, because she cares about Clarke and it's the only way she knows how to say 'I'm scared you're going to die one of these days and I'll be alone.'

"Hey, what do you know about Cage Wallace?" the woman asks suddenly. Clarke blinks.  
  
"Rich white guy the media really likes because he occasionally gives money to charity for publicity?" Clarke guesses.  
  
"I'll give you a B+ for that one," the woman says. "The only thing you got wrong is that not everyone in the media likes him. I don't. That's why those idiots in the warehouse kidnapped me. When they're punching you and demanding to know why you're digging into some guy's affairs, well, makes it obvious who sent them."  
  
"You're a journalist?" Clarke asks, raising one eyebrow. It's a moot point considering the mask doesn't show anything but the gleam of her eyes and the crimson of her lips.  
  
"Yeah. I always liked getting into fights as a kid. Now I get paid to do it. It was either this or wrestling, and if I'd gone with wrestling I probably would have given my brother an aneurysm."

Clarke hums appreciatively and doesn't say anything. When they finally arrive at a more well-lit intersection, Clarke melts back into the shadows of a nearby alley.

"Get home, pack fast, and leave," she tells the woman. "Is there someone else you can stay with for a while?"

"Yeah, I guess. Not sure I'd feel safe in my apartment anymore. That's where they took me from, you know." The woman looks back at her one more time. She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a wallet, flicks through it. Clarke thinks she's about to pay her - ridiculous, the thought - when she pulls out a business card instead. "In case you ever need a journalist on your side. And hey - if you get a chance to punch Wallace in the fucking throat, do it. If not, I'll just drag his reputation through mud."  
  
Clarke turns the card over in her hands, lingers at the mouth of the alleyway long enough to watch the woman get into a taxi safe and sound. She tilts it so that the yellow light of a nearby streetlamp illuminates bold black print.

 **OCTAVIA BLAKE**  
**THE GROUNDER TIMES**

She smirks.

Then Clarke goes back to the warehouse. The men she beat up are stirring. Before they have their wits about them she retrieves the duct tape they used to bind Octavia, and lashes them together back to back. By the time she has done they are awake and more than a little frustrated. She steps back and watches them wriggle on the floor and yell at her.

"Listen to me very carefully," Clarke says, kneeling so she's at eye level with both of them. One of them tries spitting at her, misses. Clarke is not amused. "I'm not going to kill you tonight. I'm going to leave you here for your boss to find you, only because I need you to pass on a message."  
  
"Fuck off, I ain't no mailman," one of the men says, struggling valiantly against the duct tape.  
  
"I really only need one of you alive. If you're so opposed to a simple task, I'll let your partner pass it on," Clarke says mildly. They both shut up and stop moving. "Now, who sent you? Was it Cage Wallace?"

Their silence tells them more than any spoken answer could.  
  
"Tell him to stick to being a rich boy and keep his hands off my people," Clarke says. "All the good people of this city? They're _mine_. I don't share. Make sure you tell him that."  
  
Then she stands up and walks away.

 

 

  
  
"Stop pacing," Lincoln tells him quietly. "It won't help."

Bellamy listens despite every bone in his body telling him otherwise, and is sitting in the precinct with Lincoln when the call comes. He's bitten all his fingernails down to the nailbed and the slightest scrape of the sensitive skin underneath has him wincing. He holds the lukewarm cup of coffee in his hand carefully and tries not to shiver. He's been cold since Lincoln picked up the phone, since he rushed to their apartment and saw for himself the missing chunks of the front door they hacked at to get inside.

His cell phone vibrates in his pocket. Fabric brushes his fingertips when he reaches for it, and he winces again. Lincoln looks at him with the hope of a hopeless man.  
  
"Hello?"  
  
"Bell?"  
  
The relief he feels melts away the slivers of ice that have been forming inside of him for the last few hours.

"Where are you? Are you safe?" he asks. Beside him, Lincoln groans and puts his face in his hands. His shoulders start shaking, and Bellamy doesn't know if he's laughing or crying.  
  
"You'll never believe the night I've had. I'm heading home, do you think you could meet me there? I'll wait in the diner across the street, not really in the mood to go into the apartment alone. Is Lincoln with you?"  
  
"Yeah, we're both here," Bellamy says distractedly. "Octavia, what the hell happened? Are you hurt?"  
  
For a moment, she is silent. On the other end of the call, he hears honking.

"It's better if I tell you in person," she says. And then, in a smaller, more vulnerable voice he hasn't heard in years - "Do you think Lincoln and I could stay with you for a few nights?"

 

 

 

Raven is building something.

Clarke is not sure what, but the metal scraps she brings home have started to take shape under Raven's careful hands. The engineer that lives on floor five comes by and helps her sometimes, and Clarke gets lost as soon as they start yelling technical terms at each other. Once Clarke makes the mistake of calling it weird genius foreplay and Raven starts yelling at her instead.

She opens up the window to the fire escape to find Raven asleep on the kitchen table again. The lamp is still lit, illuminating blueprints Clarke can't decipher and a half-built tangle of metal and wires. She picks Raven up, careful not to brush against bare skin, and carries her friend to bed.

There's a comic book on Raven's bed side table. Clarke picks it up, squints at the cover. _Iron Man_ , an old collectible edition. Raven stirs under the covers, mumbles sleepily and goes still again. Clarke isn't sure if she wants to laugh or cry.

She does both when she closes the door behind her, leans her back against the wall outside of Raven's bedroom and tries to stay quiet. Because of course, of all the fictional superheroes to look up to, Raven would choose Tony Stark.

Raven is building something.

Clarke feels the anticipation tingle on her skin like the calm before a lightning storm. She sits down at the kitchen table with her battered laptop and opens up an internet search for Cage Wallace.

 

 

 

The first door on the right is ajar, and the smell of marijuana drifts out and fills the dim hallway. Clarke's feet make no noise on the carpet. She raises her hand to knock on the door, then decides it'll be funnier if she just walks in. She pushes it open with one hand and grimaces at the smoke that greets her nose and stings her eyes.  
  
Jasper falls off the couch in surprise, and she chuckles at both the thud he makes when he hits the floor and the resulting yelp.

"All right there?" Clarke asks. Jasper glares at her from his place sandwiched between the couch and the coffee table, and thrusts an arm in her general direction, waving aimlessly for help. Clarke tugs down her sleeve so it covers her hand and lets him grab onto her wrist instead, hauling him up.  
  
"Woah, what happened to your face?" Jasper asks once he's standing in front of her, swaying a little. His eyes are watery and bloodshot. Clarke grimaces and adjusts the sunglasses on her nose that don't entirely hide the black eye she took from Octavia.  
  
"Punched a catcaller, he punched back," she lies breezily. "Is Monty out with his boyfriend again?"  
  
"Nah, he's taking a nap," Jasper says. "You can go wake him up. He's probably wearing pants."  
  
Clarke goes to check. Monty is, in fact, wearing pants. He's not quite asleep, but he is stoned enough that Clarke seriously considers letting him ride out his high and coming back later.

"It's cool, it's cool," Monty says as he stumbles out of bed and to the impressive array of computers in the corner. "I can hack while high. I can hack while drunk on vodka too, did you know? Jasper bet me I couldn't, but then I did, so he has to do laundry for two months."  
  
"I'm really concerned about your liver," Clarke says with a smile as Monty logs in. He beams up at her and she resolves to leave the health talk for when he's sober enough to actually remember it.  
  
"What do you want to know?" Monty asks, fingers wriggling over the keyboard.  
  
"Everything you can dig up on Octavia Blake and Cage Wallace," Clarke instructs. She watches over Monty's shoulder as he pulls up a program to run through recent headlines, and lets it run in the background while he goes looking deeper. Then Monty happens to pull up a picture of the Blake siblings for her, and pieces start clicking together.

"Go back to that photo, I've seen him before! He was a patient of mine a few weeks back. Monty, what can you find on him?" she demands.  
  
His name is Bellamy. He's a little older than her. No living relations other than Octavia. Graduated top of the class. That's as much as she picks up from the files that flash on screen in quick succession. Clarke bites her lip while Monty downloads the police database. Monty starts singing off-key as he works, and by the time he pulls a USB out of his computer with a flourish, he's gone through the entire discography of _Rent_ and is now starting on _Annie_.  
  
"Good?" Monty asks.  
  
"Excellent," Clarke responds. Monty doesn't like to accept money for his services, insists that he would never make a friend pay for help, but Clarke orders him and Jasper two large pizzas, knowing they'll appreciate the gesture. Jasper tries to plant a wet kiss on her cheek for the trouble, and Clarke only narrowly escapes the contact. She leaves the two boys grinning at her from within a cloud of smoke, and closes the door behind her.  
  
Out on the street, she pushes her sunglasses higher up her nose and walks quickly towards the nearest subway stop, vividly aware of the USB inside her jean pocket that presses against her thigh with every step. With that USB, she's going to start piecing together the mysteries that have had her roaming the streets for the last few months.  
  
Everything is connected, somehow. The vigilantes that keep washing up on the rivershore, the cops that don't look into missing persons cases. Companies that don't seem to exist when she calls their toll-free numbers. The mysterious benefactor that supplied Murphy with the gun he used to shatter Raven's spine. Octavia Blake beaten in a warehouse after asking too many questions. Clarke has been searching for the answers for months.  
  
And now that she has a name, no one's going to stop her.

 

 

 

Actually, the sheer _amount_ of information that Monty pulls for Clarke might stop her.

She enlists Raven to help her skim through all the records. Cage Wallace is nothing but a short birth notice in the newspaper for the first seventeen years of his life. As far as the world is concerned, he does not even exist until a drunk driving case during his senior year. He's at the wheel when five people are killed, two of them children. The deaths are a footnote, almost perfectly covered up.

He gets off with a slap on the wrist, of course. Clarke has seen the pattern often enough. She'll leave a rich white man with blood on his hands on the sidewalk in front of the precinct and the next morning he walks free.

After that, Cage fades once more into oblivion. He surfaces again at age twenty-four, taking over his father's energy company after an untimely death. Wallace Incorporated itself is a very boring company - steady but not steep profits, small donations to local charities at regular intervals, etc - until Clarke finds a whole folder of resignation notices. In the last few months, Wallace Inc's turnover has been exceptionally high. And another thing that's been exceptionally high - employees dying in freak accidents shortly after quitting their jobs.

"This is crazy," Clarke says, pushing her laptop away and putting her face in her hands. Across the table, Raven's nails click-clack over her own keyboard. Clarke peeks through her fingers. There's chipped purple nail polish on Raven's nails. Raven doesn't wear nail polish.  
  
"Tell me about it," Raven says, frowning intently at her screen. "Hey Clarke, come look at this."  
  
Clarke heaves herself up out of her chair and goes to lean over Raven's shoulder. Her hair tumbles forward and tickles Raven's nose, making her duck away and sneeze. Clarke hardly notices, because her attention is trapped by the police report on-screen.

"It's filed by a Nathan Miller," Raven says. "Page 1 and 6 are here but everything between is missing."  
  
"And it's relevant because..." Clarke says, trailing off as she reads. Raven reaches forward and taps the screen with one chipped purple nail.

"They went in to check an after-hours noise disturbance at Wallace Inc, and three people wound up shot," Raven finishes with a grim smile. "What do you say? Time to pay Officer Miller a visit?"  
  
"I guess it's worth a shot," Clarke says.  
  
"Good," Raven says. "I've been staring at that screen for so long for you that I think my eyes are going to fall out."  
  
"And as soon as I leave you're going to stare at your robots instead," Clarke says.  
  
"Pretty much."  
  
Clarke laughs, and goes to fetch her costume. It's dark out.

 

 

 

The apartment is dark. The kitchen window is wide open even though the nights are getting colder and colder, soft lace curtains left over from the flat's previous tenant billowing with the breeze wafting in from the street. The only light is the golden glow coming in from the window and the harsh blue of the phone on the table as it lights up with yet another missed call.

Bellamy eyes it like it's dangerous and raises another spoonful of cereal to his mouth. He poured milk in over an hour ago and the cereal's gone soggy. He shudders at its weight on his tongue, swallows with difficulty, and glares down at the half-empty bowl with disgust. His little sister's kidnapping has taken all of his appetite away.

From down the hall he hears the creak of his bedroom door. Bellamy stiffens as a willowy figure emerges from the darkness, doesn't relax until Octavia steps into the pool of light from the kitchen window.

"I didn't think you'd still be awake," she says, taking the other seat and exhaling heavily as she sits. Bellamy's heart breaks a little to see her prop her elbow on the table and rub at her forehead gingerly. He forces himself to swallow another spoonful of moist cereal instead of replying.

Octavia turns her face towards the window as the distant sound of sirens reaches them. Bellamy doesn't understand how the bruises around one of her eyes and along her jaw look like they're several days old. It's only been one.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Bellamy asks. "About what happened?"  
  
"Nah," Octavia says, her voice too light and casual. "I'll figure it out at my own pace."

He thinks suddenly of the smoke of burning candles wafting up into the church's arching ceiling, of the tiny confession box that smelled of cedar and emotional burden, of Father Kane's unwavering patience. Somehow Bellamy doesn't think Octavia would find the same comfort he did there. He nods instead.  
  
"We'll file a crime report in the morning and see if we can get an investigation started. At the very least they'll be able to offer you more protection than my shitty apartment," Bellamy says tiredly.  
  
"Bell, no," Octavia says, turning wide, frightened eyes on him. "Look, the digging I've been doing on Wallace suggests he's brought out most of the police force. Until we know who's clean, we can't risk it."  
  
"I work with these people, O," he argues. "I know who's -"  
  
"What if you don't?" Octavia interrupts. "Are you going to bet my life on it?"  
  
That's a low blow. She has to know he would never put her in any danger. She has to know. He breathes out through his nose, long and hard, feels his nostrils flare.

"So what am I supposed to do?" Bellamy asks. "Sit here and twiddle my thumbs with you? I signed up to protect people like us, Octavia."  
  
"I'm not going to twiddle my thumbs," Octavia snaps. "And neither are you. That's exactly what Wallace wants. He wants me dead, or at the very least, scared enough that I won't write about him. Not going to give the bastard that pleasure. We're going to make him regret tangling with the Blakes."

Bellamy sighs, looks down at his soggy cereal.  
  
"So you want to be the next crazy vigilante? Is that what this is, O? Because last time I checked, there's a new body turning up every three weeks, and I'm not going to let you be the next one."

Bellamy is scared, and something in his eyes, something in the darkness, must convince her. She presses her lips together in a thin line and gets up to close the window and stands in front of it for a long time, the edges of her silhouette lit up with golden light like she is the Earth facing down a blazing sun during an eclipse. Bellamy wonders when his little sister got so strong and brave.  
  
"We play to our strengths," Octavia says at last. "You keep protecting people. I keep digging for secrets. We know the law inside out, Bell, and we can use that to our advantage."

 

 

 

Clarke knows she's in deep when she actually seriously considers getting herself arrested to break into the precinct.

In the end it's the thought of her mother calling her up in the middle of the night, screeching into the phone about her record and reputation and such that changes Clarke's mind. So, breaking and entering the classic way it is.

She's rooting through cardboard boxes full of yellow folders with a pocket flashlight clamped between her teeth when the door opens. Clarke immediately turns the flashlight off and drops to the floor, but evidently not quickly enough - who ever just opened the door stands perfectly still for a moment, listening.

From her position on the floor, Clarke can see only a pair of boots illuminated by the light coming in from the hall. No heel, and the foot is wide and large. Probably male. The boots move forward, and the overhead lights flicker on. Clarke grits her teeth and searches for a better hiding spot than gray linoleum floor. The archives are just a simple, rectangular room with row upon row of shelves holding paper records. There's a tiny gap between the top of the shelves and the ceiling that Clarke thinks she could cram herself into, but if Boots happened to look up he'd see her instantly.

Boots starts prowling around the archive, and Clarke finds herself caught up in a game of cat and mouse she _really_ didn't sign up for. The window she got in through is on the other side of the room, and Boots is walking methodically down the aisle down the center. Clarke presses her back against the side of the shelf and holds her breath as Boots' footsteps stop for a moment, then start down the same row she was just in.

 _Did I put the box back?_ Clarke asks herself, dread coiling tight in her stomach.

The footsteps stop. Clarke hears a low swear, the shuffle of papers. _I totally didn't put it back. Fuck._

She bursts out from behind the shelf, wraps her arm around Boots' neck and pulls him off balance. He's taller and heavier than her, but she has mad science, superpowers, and the element of surprise on her side. He groans when she slams him into the floor and presses one knee down between his shoulderblades. It's only the messy mop of black hair falling out of his face when he shifts that prevents her from snapping his arm when he fights back.

"Blake?" Clarke asks incredulously. Boots stills instantly.

"Why are the fuck are you reading my files?" he grits out, struggling against her hold to turn and see her face. Clarke presses him down and twists his arm enough that he groans and falls limp again.  
  
"I'm bored and curious," she says sarcastically. "I'm going to ask you a question now, and you have one chance to answer. Be honest, because I can tell if you're lying. Are you on Cage Wallace's payroll?"  
  
Below her, Blake is breathing heavily, his face twisted with the discomfort of Clarke's arm bar.

"No," he says after a moment. "What the literal fuck. My sister thinks he tried to have her killed. Why the fuck would I work for that asshole?"  
  
"That's the spirit," Clarke says cheerfully. She lets his arm drop and leaps backwards in case he has hard feelings about her taking him down. He gets to his feet and glares at her as he works out the ache in his shoulder, but doesn't charge her, so she figures she's safe for now. "How's Octavia holding up?"  
  
Blake doesn't reply at first, scrutinizing her from head to toe like he's trying to figure out who the girl under the mask and the black clothing is. _Good luck with that_ , Clarke thinks.

"She's good. Still wants to tear Wallace apart," he says warily.  
  
"She seemed like a fighter," Clarke says. "I found her beaten up and the first thing she did was grin at me with her mouth all bloody. It was creepy as hell but I figured it meant she'd recover all right." She points at the cardboard box pulled off the shelf in front of them, papers strewn about the floor during their scuffle. "You said these are your files?"  
  
"Yeah," Blake says.  
  
"Good," Clarke says, business-like. "Tell me what happened the night you got shot."

 

 

 

Within the week, Raven is not the only person Clarke is making late night deliveries to. She finds the older Blake's address from Monty's files and he keeps the kitchen window open, always. One night she slides in through the gap to lay a USB on his kitchen table and finds some really, really muscular shirtless guy making himself a cup of tea.

They look at each other for a moment and then he sticks out his hand.

"I'm Lincoln. Octavia's boyfriend. Thanks for bringing her home," he says. Clarke looks pointedly at the hand.  
  
"Nice to meet you," she says. "And you're welcome. But sorry, I don't do the skin contact thing."  
  
It's not a good night for touching. There's a long slash along the length of her thigh that's oozing blood and she has no intention of passing it along to what seems like a very nice man.

"But I'll take a cup of tea, if you don't mind," Clarke says despite her best judgement.  
  
Older Blake finds them sitting at his kitchen table at 3 am discussing theories about what's _really_ happening all those nights strange lights and noises come from the Mt Weather hydro plant upriver of the city, and throws a hissy fit. Octavia shows up as well, and Clarke almost has to laugh at the absurdity of drinking tea in full costume with three civilians in pajamas.

"Never thought I'd be dragged into vigilantism..." Blake says, shaking his head with mock indignation.

"I prefer the term freelance justice," Clarke says, and Octavia gives a throaty chuckle at that.

The first few times she hangs around Blake's apartment, she has no intention of making contact with them - she's only watching out for Octavia. Cage sends a few thugs sniffing around the block, but Clarke takes care of them coolly and efficiently, like she does everything else. Still, she's wary by how few of them make it around until one night a shadow moves to greet her on the rooftop.

"It's just me," Lincoln says, stepping out into the light with his palms raised up. Clarke laughs shakily and moves away from the ledge she was just about to leap off of.  
  
"I should have known," Clarke says, taking in the sight of the powerfully built man dressed in a dark costume of his own. There are two seriously impressive knives strapped to his back, but Clarke is more interested in his clothing. She creeps closer, raps a knuckle against his shoulder pads. "Nice gear."  
  
"You should get something better too," Lincoln says with a frown, and she follows his gaze to a spot on her arm where a jaggedly-cut fire escape has torn through her sleeve. The skin underneath has already knit back together, but the tear in her shirt remains.  
  
"Nah," Clarke says. "Getting hurt gives me an edge, remember? Anyway. I'm glad I'm not the only one watching out for Octavia."  
  
Lincoln inclines his head, and then Clarke is gone to fight crime elsewhere, leaving him to defend what seems like the only journalist left in the city who's still dedicated to the truth.

Once she knows Lincoln is taking care of the Blakes, it should mean the end of her visits, but it doesn't, and that's trouble. The problem isn't that she doesn't like them. She does like them, all three of them. A lot. And the more she hangs around, the more she wants them to know the Clarke without the mask. And it scares her that although she knows that can't happen, she begins to daydream about it. Raven gives her warning looks when she repeats a joke from them later.

Still, the more crimes Clarke starts connecting to Cage Wallace, the more she returns. Octavia is relentless, Lincoln is restless. Bellamy hasn't bothered to do much decorating in his apartment, so it's no big deal to shove aside a couch and use one wall to start taping up all the bits and pieces of the mystery that Clarke's picked up. Every late night visit that Clarke makes, there are more bits of string connecting the clues together.

And then Clarke almost dies trying to secure safe passage for a witness that could have proved key for the Blakes' investigation.

 

 

  
  
"Octavia, I need help," Clarke says softly, her hand shaking with the effort of keeping the burner phone raised to her ear.  
  
"C, You okay? I can barely hear you. What's wrong?" Octavia replies immediately, her voice so loud that Clarke winces and moves the phone further from her ear.

"Shot," she murmurs, tears springing to her eyes. "Witness is dead, police are after me. Octavia, I'm scared."  
  
"You're not allowed to be scared! You are the night!" Octavia practically yells into the phone. "Stay strong for me, okay? Where are you?"  
  
"Near the precinct," Clarke says, eyes fluttering shut. "Alley. Leaning against a dumpster."  
  
"Shit, okay," Octavia says. "Bellamy can get there faster than me or Lincoln, I'm going to call him and then I'm going to call you back right after. Fuck, stay awake."  
  
Dial tone. Clarke presses her masked cheek against the side of the dumpster and starts to cry. She's been shot before, but never more than one or two shots at a time, and she's usually managed to pass those injuries straight back to the bad guys. But this time she's lost too much blood, and she doesn't have enough hands to keep herself together. She drops the burner phone against the asphalt and presses hard against her abdomen.  
  
It rings again a moment later. Clarke lets it as her eyelids droop. She's so very -

 

 

 

" - Tired," Shumway says in his best sympathetic voice. "I'm sure you must be. Come talk to me in another week or two and I'll see if there's an assignment we can put you on."  
  
Bellamy leaves his office without another word.  
  
Despite his best efforts he still hasn't been put back into field duty, something that he is now convinced is less because of his healed injury and more due to the fact that he's 'obliviously' breezed past any subtle offers from Wallace's cronies.

And that's why he's doing paperwork at the precinct when it suddenly bursts into a flurry of action. Bellamy's blood goes cold when they announce a manhunt for a vigilante of C's description. Scarcely a moment later, his phone rings, and it's Octavia, so Bellamy locks himself inside the bathroom and answers even though his leg is bouncing up and down with adrenaline.

"C says she's in an alley by the precinct," Octavia says without preamble. "She's hurt, Bell, she doesn't sound good. Can you get to her?"  
  
"Of course," Bellamy says, yanking the bathroom door open and ducking out the precinct's side door. "Octavia, what's she done this time? Shumway's sending out all units on a manhunt."  
  
"Just find her!" Octavia says desperately, so he hangs up and breaks into a run. It's not just Octavia's prime source of information they need to keep safe. It's the girl who's almost become a friend to them. He finds her only because there's a phone ringing incessantly in an alley.

Her blonde hair is drenched in blood and she's not moving, and Bellamy's stomach leaps up into his throat for a moment. And then she stirs at the sound of approaching footsteps and raises a hand to weakly bat him away when he reaches for her.  
  
"No skin contact!" C reminds him faintly, and Bellamy immediately shrugs off his jacket and wraps it around her shoulders. Behind the mask her pupils are blown wide open and her breathing is ragged, uneven.  
  
"I know, I know," Bellamy says, making sure his jacket is secure around her and picking her up. "You're okay, I got you."  
  
He murmurs a continuous stream of reassuring words as he walks down the street with her limp in his arms, ducking his head as he passes the precinct, looking over his shoulder to see if anyone's following them. There's a helicopter taking off from behind the precinct when he reaches the church's gate.

"Bellamy," C says weakly as he wrestles with the gate and hurries up the front steps. "If I die - make sure Octavia writes good things about me. I don't want to be just another dead vigilante the media hates. I want to be the good guy."

"You're not going to die," Bellamy says through gritted teeth. He grunts as he slams his shoulder against the door. It's not locked and gives under his weight easier than he expected, causing him to stumble inside. "We're safe here, we're going to patch you up."  
  
"No hospitals," C mumbles. "No skin contact."  
  
"Yeah I got it," he says. Hurried footsteps from within the darkened church have Bellamy tensing before Father Kane's alarmed face appears. "Can you help us?"  
  
Silence for a moment, Kane's searching gaze dipping from his face to C's masked one.

"Come this way," Kane says, and Bellamy looks over his shoulder one last time before following the priest to the back of the church. They lay C out carefully on a couch, and in the light Kane turns on Bellamy can see the extent of C's injuries for the first time. He swears at the multiple wounds in her front and Kane gives him a warning look.  
  
"Need to take out the bullets," C instructs them faintly. "Now before my body starts healing. Need gloves."  
  
Bellamy doesn't think he's capable of performing emergency surgery on a criminal _without_ several strong cuss words, but before he has time to doubt himself Kane pushes a pair of latex gloves into his hands and seats himself by C's head, ready to follow her instruction. The church has a first aid kit, but C seems unimpressed by the array of tools and materials at their disposal.  
  
"If you live through this, I'm killing you for making me do it," Bellamy tells C, and then he takes a deep breath and sticks the tweezers in the first wound. She bucks under the pain, and only Kane's hands holding her down allow Bellamy to pull the first slug out. He's about ninety percent sure there should be stitches and cotton balls and anesthetic involved, but C just grits her teeth and tells him to keep going.  
  
"Just take them out and let me worry about healing," she snaps when Bellamy's hand starts shaking, and it's only the steely anger in her voice that gives him the strength to continue. At last all the bullets are out and she lets him and Kane bandage her up tightly.  
  
Bellamy sits back on his heels and exhales deeply, exhausted by the night. His eyes drift to C's face - at some point Kane took off the mask so she could breathe better and she was too weak to protest, and now Bellamy sees her for the first time. He swallows the lump that's formed in his throat and tries to tear his eyes away because he knows she'd hate that he's seen her without the mask, but he can't.  
  
Her face is bloody and bruised but he can see already that she's gorgeous - high cheekbones, a straight nose, full lips. The lips are visible with the mask too, but this is the first time he's seen them together with the rest of her face and it's like up until now all he's heard is one instrument but he's finally listening to the whole orchestra. It's a masterpiece.

He's woken up twice already with thoughts of his fingers tangled in blonde hair and those full lips open wide with pleasure, and now that he's seen the rest of her face Bellamy knows he's fucking lost.

"Bellamy," Kane says. Bellamy's brain goes _wait, what?_ for a moment and then, _I should not be having these thoughts in a church_ , so he tears his gaze away from C with difficulty and looks up at Kane.  
  
"Yes?"  
  
He probably wants an explanation for Bellamy showing up late at night with a masked vigilante dying in his arms. Bellamy figures he'd probably want an explanation, in his shoes. Problem is, he doesn't have a good one. There's never a good explanation for C. She's just a force of nature.  
  
"I presume you want a warm drink. Come, we'll let Clarke rest."  
  
Bellamy rocks back on his heels, closes his eyes. Something warm sounds really good right now. He stands and follows Kane out of the room and he's so numb that his brain doesn't fully process Kane's last words until he's changed out of his bloody shirt into one of Kane's high-collared spares and poured half a cup of coffee down his throat.

"Clarke?" Bellamy asks hoarsely. "How do you know her name?"  
  
Kane looks at him sadly, and Bellamy thinks for the first time that for all the half-stilted conversations they've had over the weeks, they still know so very little about each other.

"I ran in very different social circles ten years ago," Kane says with a wry smile. "You wouldn't have recognized me then. After my mother died and the care of the church fell to me, well. I changed."  
  
"Ah," Bellamy says. A pause. "I'm glad you did."  
  
"Yes," Kane muses. "Me too."  
  
They sit in silence for a while.

"She always did have a strong sense of justice," Kane says quietly. Bellamy looks over at him, but the older man is staring into the distance, dark gaze clouded. He stands, and the folds of his black robe swish about his legs. Bellamy thinks there must be something poetic about the fact that both the priest's robes and Clarke's outfit are the shade of night, but no beautiful words immediately come to mind. Bellamy has always had words. Even when he had nothing else and Octavia would cry in the middle of the night for something to eat, he would have stories to feed her mind instead of her growling stomach.  
  
But he is tired, and his friend's dried blood is still caked under his fingernails, and the hole in his side where a bullet punched through him is aching dully again. There are no words for this.

"You should sleep," Kane says. "We'll talk in the morning."  
  
Bellamy goes back to the room where Clarke sleeps fitfully. He doesn't mean to wake her, but when he settles into a chair by the couch her glazed eyes open all the same. He remains perfectly still for a moment, hoping she'll go back to sleep, but then the sharp blue gaze focuses and she cranes her neck to look at him better.

"Hey," he says softly.

"Hey," she responds. Her voice is hoarse and exhausted. "I'm sorry..."  
  
"Don't be," Bellamy says. He reaches out one shaky hand to move a stray strand of hair out of her face, but Clarke flinches away and he suddenly remembers what happens to people who touch her when she's injured. "I'm glad you're not dead," he says instead, and then his mind helpfully supplies him with images of Clarke lying still in an alley, blood turning her black clothes darker, and a knot forms in his throat.

He stands up forcefully and paces the room without looking at her until he can breathe again. When he turns back, she's watching him with half-lidded blue eyes, and she looks so pale, so beaten, that the knot threatens to return.

"You should sleep," Clarke says hoarsely, and Bellamy almost laughs because that's the last thing on his mind, but somehow he ends up lying down on the floor anyway, his eyelids heavy and his nose clogged with the smell of incense and iron. Before he drifts off he can swear he hears Clarke's blankets rustling.

 

 

 

She sneaks out after Bellamy falls asleep on the floor next to her, as soon as she's strong enough to walk in a relatively straight line. It reminds her, absurdly, of sneaking out after her one night stands are snoring in the bed next to her, and she almost laughs until she remembers the looks Bellamy gave her before he fell asleep. They were heavy, important looks, and they make her want to cry instead.

The window to the fire escape is unlocked, and Clarke falls through it in a tangle of blood-stained limbs. There are footsteps in the kitchen, and she jerks up, ready to throw punches, until she sees it is only Raven. Raven, with her wide red eyes and shaking hands, who immediately pulls out the med kit.

"It's fine," Clarke rasps. "I already got patched up. By a priest."  
  
"Jeez, Clarke," Raven tells her, making a strangled noise in the back of her throat. "I thought you were _dead_. Your mom called too. You're on television, did you know? They're calling you a terrorist. It's worse than I've ever seen."  
  
Clarke presses her cheek against the cold linoleum floor and whines pitifully.

"I thought I was dead too," she whispers. "Raven, I can't - I can't do this anymore. I feel like I'm standing in a sinking ship, throwing water overboard with a spoon. Nothing I do makes a difference. Every criminal I take off the streets is replaced by two more, and the cops won't do anything to help, and today Bellamy looked at me like he was in love and Raven- Raven I'm going to get us all killed. All I wanted to do was _make a goddamn difference_."  
  
"Shh," Raven soothes as her rant dissolves into sobs, and Clarke loves her a lot for grabbing a blanket and wrapping it around her so she can pull her close for a hug. Clarke leans her head against Raven's shoulder and feels wool scratch at her face and cries for a long time as Raven rocks her gently back and forth. "You made a difference for me," Raven says, softly, fiercely. She is a study in contradictions, stronger than Clarke will ever be.  
  
"Can I take a break?" Clarke asks quietly once she's cried herself all out. "From all this?"  
  
"Yeah," Raven says immediately. "Of course."  
  
She cradles Clarke in her arms a little longer, and then it is all business. Cleaning her up is difficult, but it's not the first time they've had to do this. Raven pulls out the wetsuit they found on kijiji and a pair of gloves and together they stumble into the shower and manage, somehow.

The temporary brace Raven built until she can finish her suit doesn't mix well with water, and Clarke is still too weak and dizzy to stand for a long time anyway, so they sit down on the tile and Clarke tilts her head back against the water and closes her eyes as Raven's gloved hands rinse blood out of her hair. At the end of it all the smell of shampoo overpowers that of copper and when Raven tucks her into bed, Clarke can almost pretend everything is -

 

 

  
"- Okay?" Jackson asks, his drooping eyes soft with concern. Clarke jerks back to reality, having missed the first half of his sentence.  
  
"I'm fine," she says automatically, even smiles at him briefly before turning away.

Two days later her injuries have mostly healed and she's returned to work. On the tv in the waiting room the police are pulling yet another vigilante out of the river. This one's name was Atom. Clarke stares blankly at the tv for a moment and changes the channel.

There's a buzzing in her head on her commute home that won't go away.

"Shut up," Clarke says, swatting at her ears, and the man who was walking towards her on the sidewalk abruptly swerves away and crosses the street. She doesn't blame him. The circles under her eyes are darker than ever.

The most shocking thing, perhaps, is that one day she takes the bus to the nicest area of the city, to where the towering condos have views of the river from their balconies, high up enough that they can't see all the filth in the water. Her heartbeat thrums in her ears like a jackhammer as she slips into the lobby after a resident who doesn't question her after she holds the door open for him and the quivering stack of textbooks in his arms. The elevator pings at every floor, and Clarke resists the urge to chew her fingernails.

Her mother answers the door scarcely a minute after Clarke knocks. For a moment they stand apart, reading the strained wrinkles in each other's foreheads, the exhaustion in their shoulders. Then Abby Griffin gives a choked sob and embraces Clarke like she never wants to let go again.

 

 

 

She sees Bellamy again in the most mundane of places. Her knuckles go white against the handle of the cart full of groceries she's pushing down aisle seven and her mouth goes dry, but it's too late to turn back. He glances over, a cereal box in each hand, and raises an eyebrow at her. It vanishes underneath a veritable tangle of thick, dark hair.

God, Clarke has dreamed of playing with that hair. It's a problem.

"I'm debating between this sugary shit O likes and something decently nutritious," he says, like she wasn't dying the last time he saw her. Clarke leans heavily on the grocery cart and silently thanks it for being the only reason she's still standing up right now.  
  
Funny, she can take on multiple men twice her weight at the same time without breaking a sweat, but all Bellamy Blake has to do is raise an eyebrow at her and her knees go weak in all the right ways.

"Sugary shit," she says, sounding only mildly strangled. "Life is short."  
  
He cracks a smile at that, and Clarke has to look away because beautiful people are her kryptonite and she's not emotionally stable enough to deal with this yet. She might never be emotionally stable enough for this, now that she thinks about it. Vigilantism doesn't leave a lot of room for stability in her life.

"It's been a while," Bellamy says as he takes her advice and tosses the colourful cereal into the basket at his feet. He takes a few steps sideways and slots the other back on the shelf. Clarke's heard enough about his and Octavia's childhood to know he worked a variety of odd jobs to support them both. Clarke likes that even though he's a cop now, he still remembers the pain of retail enough to reshelf everything properly.  
  
Fuck, she's in deep. She's admiring the way he puts a fucking box of cereal back in its place.

"Yeah," Clarke says. "I - I had to take a break."  
  
Bellamy just nods, sticks his hands in his pockets.

"I guess I can understand that," he says quietly. "I just wanted you to know that I missed you dropping in."  
  
"I missed you too," she says without thinking, and that was stupid of her mouth to do without her permission, because Bellamy's eyebrows raise again, both of them this time. His lips part like he's about to speak, but he falters and licks them instead. Clarke tries not to let her eyes track the movement.  
  
"Do you think..." Bellamy says hesitantly, like he's scared that if he says the wrong words she'll balk and run away for three weeks again. "Do you think we could hang out again? Maybe without the Batman shit, if you're still taking a break?"  
  
Clarke laughs, and it feels good, like something's been sitting on her chest this whole time and she never noticed its weight on her ribcage until it was gone and she could breathe freely again.

"Bellamy Blake, are you asking me out?" she asks. He shrugs again, and it's a funny motion with his hands still stuck in his pockets. Clarke laughs again, revels in the simple delight it gives her.  
  
"Are you saying yes?" he retorts. Clarke presses her lips together but doesn't succeed in entirely swallowing her smile. Her fingertips tingle at how incredibly _normal_ this is, flirting with a gorgeous man in a grocery store. She hasn't allowed herself normal since she was in college and a twelve year old jammed a knife between her ribs in an alleyway and her oldest friend made the mistake of catching her before she hit the ground.  
  
Clarke takes a deep, rattling breath. Inside of her, a heart full of hungry want snaps at the confines of her ribcage. _Yes_ , she thinks. _I want this_.  
  
"Do you even know my last name?" Clarke jokes instead, and Bellamy lets out a deprecating huff.  
  
"I may or may not have looked you up," he admits. His face goes serious. "But I didn't want to push you, if you didn't want to see me or O again. I'm glad I ran into you."  
  
Clarke lets go of her grocery cart and cups his face with both hands and kisses him square on the lips. It's the first time she's ever touched him and it feels monumental. He is soft and warm and responsive against her, and the scarf he has wrapped around his neck to ward off the winter chill scrapes against her chin and makes her stand on her tiptoes to kiss him better. His hands find her hips and rest there with all the familiarity of an old lover, and they don't break apart until a poor teenaged cashier trying to mop up the floor around them makes an unhappy noise.

Clarke ends up tripping over Bellamy's basket when she backs away, and he catches her, and for once in her life she's in a romantic comedy instead of a dark, gritty superhero film with too many allusions to the human condition to be good for her mental health. He laughs, and she opens her mouth to apologize.  
  
"I'm - "

 

 

 

" - seeing someone," Clarke admits reluctantly over a hurried lunch with her mother another month later. They're sitting by the window in a cafe that's halfway between Abby's hospital and her walk in clinic, and the snowflakes that are falling past them on the other side of the glass are straight out of a fairy tale. They are soft and wet enough that they clump together as they drift down slowly, slowly, picture perfect until they land on the gray, bubblegum-stained sidewalk and melt.

"Are they cute?" Abby asks around a mouthful of chicken salad. She winks at her daughter, over-exaggerated, and Clarke is torn between groaning at Abby's attempt to sound like a gossiping middle schooler and smiling at the gender-neutral statement.  
  
" _Mom_ ," she says, stretching out the vowel because hey, if they're going to go with the gossiping middle schooler act, they're going to do it _right_. "But yes. He's very cute."  
  
"You should bring him to the hospital's Christmas party," Abby says, her tone casual but her eyes sharp and inquisitive. "I want to meet his mysterious man who's captured your elusive attention."

Clarke almost says no, based on nearly two decades of the people she chose to date never once measuring up to her mother's impossible standards. Plus, Abby's hospital functions are stuffy and formal and Clarke will have to wear heels and try not to look strained when Thelonious Jaha's eyes land on her and his whole face drops when he doesn't see his son by her side, not anymore.

But Abby's been trying hard to mend their fractured relationship, and Clarke knows it's not easy for her to swallow down her controlling nature and let Clarke just _be_. So she swallows down her initial refusal and nods.

"Okay," she says, and the relief that makes the corners of Abby's eyes crinkle is almost worth it. "I'll ask him."

 

 

 

"I cannot believe I let you talk me into this," Bellamy says three weeks later as Clarke picks a fight with the blue bowtie around his neck. He humours her for another few moments before gently prying her shaking hands off the mangled bowtie and sticking it in his pocket. They'll find someone else at the party to tie it, neither he nor Clarke have had much success with it.

"We can stay home instead," Clarke says in a strangled voice, and Bellamy's heart skips a beat when he hears her call his tiny flat _home_. She's been spending the odd night here, and every morning he wakes up with her blonde hair splayed all over his pillow he can't stop himself from grinning as he goes to make breakfast. "It would probably be safer for all parties involved."  
  
"Hey," he says gently, grabbing her hand and smoothing his thumb over her knuckles. "It's going to be okay."  
  
Clarke bites down hard on her lip and stares somewhere in the direction of his collarbones, which are exposed by the collar they both rumpled trying to tie the damned bowtie.  
  
"My mother is..."  
  
"I know, Clarke. You literally have not shut up about this for three weeks. Don't worry. I'm a charismatic bastard, or at least that's what O tells me."  
  
"Charismatic," Clarke says flatly, raising one eyebrow.  
  
"I am," Bellamy insists. "It's not my fault that the circumstances in which we met were ones that made it very difficult for me to be charming."  
  
Clarke rolls her eyes and swats his chest, but she seems more collected after that, so he figures he must have done something right. He can read her easily even though he's only known her a few months, seen her maskless and in the daylight even less than that. It's a level of understanding that serves them well as the evening goes on. Bellamy knows when the squeezes of her hand in his mean he has to play nice with someone who comes up to chat with them, or that they need to retreat quickly before conversation veers into dangerous territory.

She stiffens once more when Bellamy finally comes face to face with Abby Griffin. He slings his arm around Clarke's shoulder and pulls her into his side, and only after this she smiles again.

"You must be Bellamy," Abby says, raising her chin and scrutinizing him closely. It's a rhetorical question - she's just examining him like he's a bacteria culture in a petri dish.  
  
"That would be me, yes," Bellamy says, extending his free hand out for her to shake. Abby takes it slowly, deliberately, her eyes never leaving Bellamy's. He keeps a polite smile, telling him that she can't see the things under his skin that make him _him_. She can't see a father that was never there or a mother that worked herself to death or the ragged-eyed teenager he used to be, working three jobs to get Octavia through school.  
  
"It's a pleasure to meet you," Abby says, and her words are simple. Polite. They're not nearly as judgmental or snide as he expected from Clarke's worrying. He can work with polite - this is just the foundation of a first impression he can build on.  
  
Still, he's relieved when Clarke drags them both out of the conversation and to a safer venue - the buffet table. Bellamy doesn't understand why the fancier the party and the richer the guests, the smaller the food. He eyes a nearby plate of crackers with cream cheese and caviar and thinks longingly of his college days, of him and Miller cramming all their friends in a tiny apartment and gorging themselves on pizzas hot enough to burn their tongues.

"How long do we have to stay?" he asks Clarke discreetly. Her dress is backless and he can see a mole between her shoulder blades at this angle.  
  
"You were the one insisting this was a good idea!" Clarke complains, elbowing him in the ribs. "And now you want to leave?"  
  
"Now I know better," Bellamy says mournfully, and she laughs and kisses him apologetically. Her lips don't linger nearly long enough, but Bellamy can feel eyes on them and he doesn't want to look but it's probably Abigail Griffin and he doesn't want to piss her off. So when Clarke says she's going to the open bar to get them both some champagne - they've made it through half the party! It calls for a celebration! - he lets her.  
  
And letting her leave his side turns out to be the worst mistake of his life, but he doesn't know it at the time. He's still eyeing the caviar crackers with a reasonable amount of skepticism when the explosion rocks the banquet hall.

The first thing Bellamy is aware of is the ringing in his ears. Everything feels fuzzy and far away, and it's with some disconnect that he sits up - when did he get on the ground? - and raises a trembling hand to his ears. It comes away bloody and he just stares at it for a moment because it doesn't make any sense. He doesn't feel any pain yet - that comes later - and he's stuck by the strangest sensation of not occupying is body, of being the puppetmaster of a marionette that was just jerked around by invisible strings and thrown to the ground and now the stuffing is coming out of it.

Then a scream cuts through the fuzziness - and it still sounds distant, but it makes him clamber to his feet anyway, using the overturned buffet table as support. He sways dangerously on his feet but remains standing, even as he looks around and sees that the whole world has been turned upside down. Black and white tuxedos now stained with red, too dark and thick to be wine. Nothing remains of the beautiful stained glass window he and Clarke admired when they came in but shards of glass that crunch under his shoes as he takes shaky steps forward. And the far wall - the one with the coat check and the open bar - it's gone.

He sees blonde hair splayed over the floor and the mole between her shoulderblades has been drenched in a flood of scarlet. Bellamy doesn't remember running to her, but one moment he is staring in horror from afar and the next he is kneeling next to her, his hands hovering just over her still form.

She's dead, he knows, Clarke's dead and a scream catches in his throat and remains there, a piece of eternal grief.

Abby appears at his side like a ghost, her lips parted with her own cry of anguish. She reaches for Clarke, and Bellamy throws his arm out to stop her.

"You can't," he says through choked sobs. "If you touch her-"  
  
He can't get any farther. Abby looks at him, and he can see her making her mind up.

"She's my daughter," he hears her say through the ringing in his ears, and reaches again for Clarke. Abby Griffin keels over instantly, glassy-eyed and with a single, last exhale. In the chaos surrounding them, no one notices but him. Clarke stirs weakly, and Bellamy rests his hand on hip where her dress is still intact, because he's injured and doesn't want her to leech his injuries away.  
  
"Bellamy," Clarke slurs, and she sits up. He knows the exact moment she sees her mother's body lying next to her because she screams, and it doesn't sound human. It doesn't sound like anything he's ever heard from her before. She lurches forward, arms outstretched towards Abby, and Bellamy pulls her back because he doesn't know what happens if Clarke touches a corpse but he doesn't want to find out.  
  
She fights him, kicking and screaming, as he drags her out of the banquet hall. She calls him a monster, and a coward, and a dozen other things that bury into his flesh like knives, but he doesn't let her leave this time because he lost her once and he's not making that mistake again.

Still, Bellamy thinks she must understand, on some level, the sacrifice her mother made, because he's fully aware she could have broken his arms and escaped his grip a dozen times already, but she doesn't. She fights him until she's exhausted, and Bellamy just holds her mutely as she wails in his arms. At one point the paramedics wrap shock blankets around them both because she won't let go of him long enough for them to give her her own, and slowly her sobs turn to silent shudders, and still he cradles her through the storm. 

 

 

 

In the aftermath, they rebuild.  
  
Clarke was supposed to say the last eulogy, but just before it comes to it she breaks down. On the surface she still seems exactly as she was a few moments ago, but Raven knows her friend better than that. She sees the panic in the red-rimmed eyes behind the sunglasses, sees the quiver in her hands, the white-knuckled grip on a scrap of paper folded and unfolded so many times it's in danger of falling apart.

Raven reaches over and places her own hand over Clarke's, and she flinches at the contact out of habit.

"Are you sure?" she asks, and Clarke looks at her like a deer caught in headlights.  
  
"Yes," she whispers, and when they call her name, Raven stands up instead. She hobbles to the casket, in more pain than usual because it's snowing and humidity does nothing good for the hole in her spine. Normally she'd be pissed and shake her fist at the sky, but to Raven it seems fitting that the sky itself is crying for Abby Griffin, the mother she never had.  
  
She pauses at the side of the coffin, eyes it momentarily before sliding her gaze away and clearing her throat.

"Abby was the kind of person you loved, or you loved to hate," Raven says, and everything else melts away. She is not aware of anyone else in the crowd but her and Clarke, not even Bellamy who sits on her other side and is enduring Clarke's fingernails digging desperately into his wrist. "Like my best friend Clarke, she was headstrong and clever and intimidating - but she was also very loving. When I came home with Clarke for the holidays after our first semester of university instead of going to my family, I think Abby figured out, somehow, that I needed a mother, and that's what she was to me, to both of us. She was a great doctor, and a board member that did good things for this city, but most importantly, she was a mother, and we three didn't always see eye to eye, but we loved each other, and that's what Clarke and I want to remember."  
  
Clarke's crying again at this point. Raven says more things, but she's not really aware of them. She finishes off her improvised speech, places one hand on the casket, and then the service is over. People start to file away to the church, leaving only her, Clarke, and Bellamy, who hasn't left her side since the explosion.

Clarke stands and joins her over the casket, looking down into the hole that will be her mother's last resting place. Snow dots the coffin and melts upon contact, white on mahogany.

"It's not fair," she whispers to Raven.  
  
"Yeah," Raven says. "I know."  
  
They turn to leave, but colourful flowers at the corner of Raven's eye make her pause for another moment. She doesn't recall whoever left the bouquet, but it's large and overdone, the brightest splash of colour in the graveyard. Raven hates it on principle. She hobbles closer to check the tag, intending to find out who she needs to punch in the face, and feels as though she's the one who's been hit instead.

"Clarke," she says, sounding a little strangled.  
  
She and Bellamy come to look on either side of Raven.

"I'm going to kill them," Clarke says, softly, as simply as one might state 'it's raining.'  
  
And Raven - Raven who has washed the blood off Clarke's hands for years, Raven who fought alongside her until a single misplaced bullet changed everything, Raven who watched Clarke die on their fire escape and come back to life a few minutes later - believes her.

 

 

 

"I checked the records. Wallace Inc doesn't supply that sector of the city."

Bellamy's voice comes in muffled over the phone, and as Clarke leans over her fire escape she tries to imagine what he is doing now. He's probably in his kitchen, messy-haired, wearing that ratty gray shirt he should have thrown out years ago but keeps because it's soft and worn and she likes to nuzzle her face against it. He probably has her on speakerphone, propped up on the fruit bowl while he shuffles through the papers spread haphazardly over the desk, lit only by the setting sun coming in through the window and the shitty flickering lightbulb ahead.

"We'll find something else to link them," she responds dully, closing her eyes. Something over the phone line crackles and beeps and then she hears Bellamy's soft breathing, so he must have noted something in her voice and turned speakerphone off.

"Clarke," he says softly.  
  
"No, Bell," she tells him. "Nothing you can say is going to stop me."  
  
"I know. I had no intention of trying."  
  
It's not fair that he knows her so well after such a short time. Clarke tries to focus on his rhythmic breathing instead of the sounds of traffic and city all around her. Everything seems loud tonight - after Jake died, Clarke felt everything as though a sheer curtain had been dropped between her and the world, and nothing felt real. But Abby's death (murder) has only clarified everything, made it vivid and unapologetic and vicious, and she can ignore it no longer.

"I have to do this."  
  
"You don't have to do it alone," he says, and that's where he's wrong.  
  
"You're in danger," she says. "It's my fault. If I cut you out-"  
  
"Nothing will change if you break up with me, Clarke." He's angry. "Octavia and I, we're already in too deep. If we go down, we're going down together, but for fuck's sake, I'm doing it fighting."  
  
"If they know who I am-"  
  
"They don't. Wallace sent flowers to every single victim of the explosion."  
  
She lets out a frustrated groan and switches her phone to the other ear so she can use that hand to massage her temples. Bellamy is infuriatingly good at his job, and sometimes she wishes he were a little less perceptive.  
  
"How's Octavia's article coming along?" she asks instead.  
  
"She's taken over a second wall in the living room. We have tons of evidence, Clarke, but it's still not linked well enough. Most of the lawyers and the judges I've worked with will tear it down as circumstantial in minutes."  
  
"I have a lawyer," Clarke says through gritted teeth. "You can trust him. Find me the least corrupt judge and I'll..."  
  
"Go out and punch people in dark alleys?"  
  
She's silent for a moment, watching a cat with matted haunches jump into the dumpster underneath her and start pawing at a garbage bag with a tear in it. Clarke's seen it around a few times and has tried to feed it, but it always runs away before she can get close.  
  
"Sometimes I use a taser," she says, and hangs up.

 

 

 

It happens like this: Clarke breaks into an office building owned by one of Wallace Inc's satellite companies to find some more employee records for Octavia. She's armed with a USB carrying one of Monty's superb password-cracking programs, her taser, and a scream of rage and pain and justice that's been stuck unheard in her throat since she last died.

It goes without a hitch at first. She's just pulled Monty's USB out of the data terminal with as many records as she could possibly fit into 32GB when the elevator dings. She stuffs the USB down her shirt and dives to the side as the doors part and three hired thugs stride onto the floor, all bent knees and raised chins and cocky confidence. Clarke's handled worse.

It's a fight that's nothing out of the ordinary, and that's what grits on her nerves afterwards – she got careless, too certain in her own abilities to take them out. All three men hit men hit the floor instead of her, but not before one of them grabs desperately towards her face and nearly pulls the mask off.

She catches it and readjusts it before her whole face is exposed, but it makes her scared, and fear makes her angry. Clarke punches him until he's unconscious and then flees the premises, her heart fluttering in her chest like a caged bird.

Here is what she missed: a single blinking red light in a corner, a single camera still recording that she hadn't smashed when she came in. She leaves the men groaning in the dust, and the camera rolls on, blinking dutifully.

 

 

 

Clarke calls Raven in a panic.

“Someone almost pulled my mask off,” Clarke gasps into her burner phone, crouched on a rooftop in the shadow of some air conditioning units, lying unused during the winter. Her breath comes through in a billowing cloud of white, taking form in the cold night.

“Do you think they saw you?” Raven says, her voice all business but no hysteria. Nothing fazes Raven.

“I don't know,” Clarke says, rocking back and forth on her heels and shivering. “I hit him hard enough to give him a concussion, so chances are his memories will be a little foggy, but we can't rely on chance, Raven. I think you need to leave the city, you and Bellamy and Octavia too.”

“Bullshit.”

“Raven-”

“ _Bullshit_ ,” Raven repeats, this time more forcefully. “For now, we sit tight and assume you got away. Where are you? Are you hurt?”

“I can get home on my own,” Clarke says, and she breathes in deep, feeling winter air scratch at her throat and sting her lungs. “I'm okay.”

“You're going to get yourself killed one of these days,” Raven says sadly, and Clarke presses her lips together into a very thin line and says nothing because she is not entirely sure she can die, and at this point death has started feeling like the punchline to some giant joke everyone but her is in on. She is no longer afraid. She lost that ability when a twelve-year old stuck a knife between her ribs and Wells bled instead of her.

 

 

 

Although it's been seven years since she last laid eyes on Wells Jaha, he hasn't changed at all. Inside of Clarke's chest her heart squeezes painfully when she spots him sitting by the window, one hand raising a cup of coffee to his lips while the other flips dutifully through a newspaper.

Part of her seriously considers turning back – letting Bellamy find his own trustworthy lawyer, or getting Raven to talk to Wells instead – but it's been seven years and she's become an orphan and it suddenly strikes her that of all the people left in this city, on this planet – Wells has known her the longest.

It is that nostalgia that makes her smile involuntarily when she walks into the cafe and he looks up, his face splitting with relief and joy when their eyes meet.

“How can you smile at me when I let you spend a month in a hospital and never once called?” Clarke asks after they've exchanged the usual pleasantries and he's ordered her a coffee of her own.

“Because you're Clarke,” he says, like that's an acceptable answer.

What was supposed to be a business proposition turns into a five-hour long conversation. Wells takes the case without hesitation, even when Clarke tells him that Octavia's still working on finding evidence and they're not entirely sure _what_ the case is yet. And then she tells him everything else in hushed tones – of the limits she started pushing after the first time she transferred her injuries to him, of the waves of crime in the city that she can barely hold back on her own, of Bellamy Blake and even of Abby, whose name she still can't quite say without choking. Wells lets her cry into three consecutive coffees – decaf after the first one because even her body can't handle that much – and cries himself as well.

The cafe's manager kicks them out at closing time, and Clarke leads Wells home, one hand tucked into the crook of his elbow because she forgot her gloves and it's the only way to keep her fingers warm.

“I'm glad you called me,” Wells says as they walk down the hall towards her apartment, and Clarke swats his shoulder because she's going to start crying again and then Raven will poke fun at her. As expected, Raven's pleased to see him as well, because she's heard a lot about him from Clarke even though they only really knew each other through her.

Raven breaks out the beer, and they sit in the living room talking until Wells falls asleep on Clarke's shoulder and she falls asleep on Raven's. And it's perfect, and nothing could ruin this for Clarke. In the morning they wake up and Wells makes pancakes, criticizing them for the lackluster stocking of their fridge. Raven throws her head back and laughs and even Clarke cracks a smile as she shakes her head.

"I love - "

 

 

 

"- you guys. This is messed up."

Bellamy dances around the word 'kidnapping' for as long as possible, but Octavia is not impressed.

"Can I just remind everyone this happened to me a few months ago?" she says, pacing the living room like a trapped tiger. She's been getting worse and worse in captivity, itching for them to connect the pieces and bring down Cage Wallace and by extension, the invisible bars that hold her hostage in Bellamy's apartment. "And now you want me to agree to do it to someone else?"  
  
"It's entirely different," Clarke argues. "Cage's men beat you and were going to kill you. We have no intention of hurting anyone, but we need to get someone to talk or else this whole case falls apart and you know it."  
  
"This is the wrong way of doing it," Octavia says. She whirls on Bellamy instead, who is leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, looking stony. "We promised each other we'd stay on the right side of the law. You promised to _protect_ people."  
  
"The law isn't good enough," Clarke hisses, having already run through this argument once with Bellamy before he reluctantly took her side.  
  
"We are protecting people, O," the older Blake says wearily. "Look at the goddamn big picture."  
  
"Lincoln?" Octavia asks, staring down the man who has so far stayed silent. He raises his head to look at her, slowly, and nods his head so minutely only someone looking straight at him would see. Octavia groans angrily in response and drags one of the kitchen chairs out from the table, its legs screeching violently against linoleum. Clarke winces.  
  
They let her stew for several more minutes. The radiator under the window dies with a high-pitched whine, and then valiantly comes back to life, sputtering and chugging.

"O," Bellamy says, breaking the silence. "Please. You're the one whose read all the employee reports. Who's our best chance? If you help us we only have to do this once and no one else has to get dragged in."  
  
Octavia rubs at her eyes with the palms of her hands and then reaches for her laptop, blinking furiously.

"It's not that simple, Bell," she says, fingers tapping away at the keys. "I'm agreeing to this only on the condition that I'm there and I can make sure you don't hurt her."  
  
"We're the good guys here," Clarke reminds Octavia, but the younger woman pointedly ignores her as she pulls up the file she's looking for. She turns the laptop around so all of them can see, and Bellamy leans close to read the name next to the photo of a young woman with pale skin and tired, bruised eyes.  
  
"Maya Vie," he says aloud, and Clarke has her next target.  
  
"Where can I - "

 

 

 

" - Find anything in this mess?" Raven mutters as she hobbles around stacks of half-finished robot prototypes.  
  
"Quit griping," Wick says, waving a wrench at her.

Raven and Wick from apartment 2B have an arrangement, and it's a very good arrangement. Every afternoon after he's come home from the 'boring-ass' manufacturing firm he works for, she packs up her studies and slowly makes her way downstairs to the apartment below her. At this point she doesn't knock anymore, because Wick is always expecting her.

They spend two or three hours working on Raven's comeback suit while he cracks Iron Man jokes and she scratches out most of the modifications he's added to her designs, and rivet by rivet, afternoon by afternoon, their work comes together.

Raven has decided to forego Tony Stark's full ensemble because she doesn't have a tiny nuclear reactor embedded between her chest, nor does she plan to, thank you very much. Instead her masterpiece is more of the barebones of an exoskeleton, most heavily focused around the leg she's been dragging around since Murphy shot her.

Once it's done, she'll be able to keep up with Clarke on the streets. It's a thought that makes her whole body hum with adrenaline, and Wick notices.

"You're looking chipper today," he says.  
  
"Who says chipper anymore?" Raven mutters, ducking underneath an outstretched metal arm. She's considering stealing Clarke's spare taser and mounting it on her wrist with a release mechanism like Spiderman's, except instead of sending out spiderwebs, she'll be sending out volts and justice. Well, she supposes Peter Parker also deals in justice, but _semantics_.  
  
"I do," Wick says mildly.  
  
"Yeah, yeah," Raven says, her voice slightly muffled when she tucks an allen key between her teeth so she doesn't lose it. She struggles to adjust the angle of a metal bar that's supposed to go down the length of her thigh - by her design it should have been perfect, and she's tempted to blame the discrepancy on Wick, but despite her teasing she knows he's actually pretty good at what he does. If he wasn't, she wouldn't be working with him.  
  
She takes the allen key out of her mouth and scowls at the bar.

"Hey Wick?" she asks. "Do you have a wire cutter around here?"  
  
"Wire cutters are for the weak," Wick answers promptly. "I use my teeth. Like a chipmunk."  
  
"Very funny," Raven mutters. "Seriously, no wire cutter? What kind of an engineer are you?"  
  
"A good one, wrenchmonkey. I'll have you know I'm paid very well for what I do."  
  
"Your job makes you cry tears of boredom, remind me again why I should be jealous?" Raven says. Wick rolls his eyes and mutters something under his breath, and Raven knows she's won. "Can you make yourself useful and grab my wire cutters? They're in my room, under the desk. Probably. If not there, check the kitchen sink."  
  
"The kitchen sink," Wick repeats scornfully as she tosses her apartment keys at him. He walks out shaking his head and Raven is glad he doesn't make a bigger deal out of it because she doesn't like to admit that stairs are hard for her, even with the day-to-day brace she's built for herself.

Wick returns a moment later, a strange look on his face.

"Hey Reyes, are you expecting visitors today?"  
  
Raven arches one eyebrow at him. He's not holding her wire cutters.

"Your apartment's crawling with guys in suits and sunglasses, Men In Black - style," he says. "They asked if I knew where you or Clarke is, I said no."  
  
A memory rings in Raven's mind of Clarke crying on the phone - _someone almost pulled my mask off, someone almost pulled my mask off, someone almost pulled my mask off_. Her hand is immediately in her pocket, grasping for her phone. Clarke's number is the first one she has on speeddial, and as the call rings emptily in her ear she paces Wick's kitchen viciously. He watches her the whole while, alarmed and uneasy. There's a click over the line, and then all Raven hears is the dial tone.

She pulls her phone away from her ear and stares at it in horror. There's no way they've already got Clarke - they wouldn't have asked Wick if he knew where she was if they did, right?

"Reyes, what the hell is going on?"

She turns towards her exo-skeleton, raking it over with appraising eyes. It's nowhere near the sketches and blueprints that adorn Wick's kitchen table.

"Fuck," Raven says, shrugging off her jacket so she stands in front of the exoskeleton in nothing but jeans and a cotton shirt. "Wick, help me get into this thing."  
  
"Reyes-"  
  
"Just do it," she snaps.  
  
"It's not ready. It's not going to work."

"Clarke's shift at the clinic just ended, she'll be home in twenty minutes," Raven hisses, getting up in Wick's face. "If those men are still here when she shows up, they're going to kill her over and over again and I'm not letting that happen. Are you going to help me or do I have to do this on my own?"  
  
"It doesn't matter how much you want it to work, Reyes - _it's not ready_. You need a new plan. You've got a beautiful brain, _use it_."

"I _am_ using it."  
  
And then Raven's gaze slides past Wick to the living room, where a single ratty couch is covered in half-built robots. She snaps her fingers, too excited to speak, and darts forward, grabbing the nearest remote. She and Wick designed them to be universal, to work for all the robots they made. His eyes light up when he sees what she's picked up.  
  
"I love you," Wick announces, and even though Raven knows he's joking, she also knows he's kind of not joking, and her stomach lurches -

 

 

 

\- and Clarke winces as the woman she's watching takes another tumble to the floor.  
  
Maya is a ballerina.

She is not a very good one, or perhaps she is and the movement she is practicing is merely a very difficult one. Clarke wouldn't know. She sits in the foyer of the dance studio for upwards of half an hour, watching Maya dance through the glass. She is a small, flighty woman, with eyes that dart to every corner of the studio but never meet her reflection in the mirror, and she does not have the bearing of a traditional ballerina, but she has - _something_.

Faith, perhaps. There is a fragile determination in her strained muscles and bruised toes that Clarke has to admire. Maya falls after another grueling spin, and gets up without making a sound, already prepared to try another time, and another time, and yet another, and Clarke envies her faith in eventual success.

Most days Clarke thinks she is spinning aimlessly alone in an empty universe.

Just before Maya's class ends she slips outside and walks a little ways down the street, pulling her scarf up higher to shield her nose from the biting wind. She can't see Lincoln, but she knows he's somewhere nearby. He's extraordinarily stealthy for being a man of his size and stature.

Maya comes out bundled tightly in a plain black coat, her dark hair tucked neatly underneath a red hat. It makes her very easy to track as she slings her purse over her shoulders and walks down the street away from Clarke.

Clarke gives her a minute's head start and then starts following. Maya notices her about five minutes later, which is half the time it takes most people. She walks faster, looking furtively over her shoulders as Clarke closes the distance between them. She takes exceedingly twisted routes, tries to lose her in crowds. At last she whirls around at a deserted intersection, one hand plunged into her purse, and Clarke slows her steps, raising her hands up in the air to show that they're empty.

"Why are you following me," Maya demands, brown eyes wide with fear. She shifts her weight uneasily from foot to foot as Clarke walks forward. "Stay where you are!"  
  
"I just want to talk, Maya," Clarke says softly, trying for the same tone her mother used with hysterical patients.  
  
"How do you know my name?"  
  
"I've been looking for you," Clarke says, trying to make her face friendly. "Please, can we talk somewhere quieter? I promise you can trust me."  
  
"I'm not going anywhere with you," Maya says. " _Stop walking forward!_ I signed the contract, what more do you want?"  
  
Clarke frowns, momentarily taken aback.

"What contract?" she asks, her hands dipping while she's distracted.  
  
" _Leave me alone!_ " Maya cries, and then she pulls her hand out of her purse with a taser. Clarke moves in the split second before Maya can aim and pull the trigger, ducking out of the way and kicking the weapon out of Maya's hand with a spinning kick. Maya backs up, straight into Lincoln's chest. He claps a hand over her mouth and picks her up, carrying her into the back parking lot where Octavia and Bellamy are waiting with the car.  
  
As soon as Lincoln throws her into the backseat and lets go of her jaw, Maya opens her mouth to scream again. Clarke, on the other side, plunges a needle full of sedative into her neck and Maya manages only a pained whimper before she slumps onto Clarke's shoulder. Lincoln gives her a look from the other side of the car.

"I'm tired of people getting hurt because I'm not strong enough to hurt the right ones," Clarke says simply, and the uneasiness in Lincoln's eyes doesn't go away so Clarke turns her face towards the window and ignores him until she no longer feels his eyes boring into her back. Her phone buzzes in her pocket, and she hangs up without checking it. She can't talk to anyone right now.  
  
Wells unlocks the shipyard gate for them with a hard set to his jaw, and Clarke feels her first pang of regret before she pushes it down. She can't afford to be weak, not now. Maya wakes up about fifteen minutes after they've reached the warehouse. Octavia refused to let them ziptie her wrists to the chair, so the first thing Maya does is when she comes to is stumble to her feet and raise it over her head.

"Please put the chair down," Bellamy says, stepping forward, his palms towards the floor. "We just want to talk. We don't want to hurt you."  
  
"Like hell!" Maya spits, but her gaze flickers all around the warehouse and she seems to realize she's trapped and outnumbered, because she reluctantly places the chair down between herself and her captors. She remains standing, staring at them warily.  
  
Clarke takes a deep breath.

"Five months ago Cage Wallace tried to have my friend Octavia killed because she was asking too many questions about fake companies registered under his name. One month ago Wallace's company sent flowers to every single victim of an explosion the cops deemed an accidental gas leak. Your signature was on the receipts. We want to know why."  
  
Maya does not answer. She stares at the concrete floor and trembles, her knuckles white and bony on the back of the chair she refuses to sit in. Clarke's phone buzzes again, and she ignores it, perfectly focused on the woman in front of her.  
  
"Maya," Wells says softly. "People are getting hurt, and we want to stop it. But we've reached a dead end and we think you're the only person who can help us out. If you can't do that then we'll let you walk out of here and never bother you again. But if you know something - anything - that could save lives, please tell us."  
  
"They killed my father," Maya murmurs after several moments. "And they said they would kill me if I didn't sign their contract."  
  
"Vincent Vie," Octavia says, looking up from her files. "He worked for Wallace Inc too, he's on the list of employees that went missing. Are you sure he's dead?"  
  
"Missing is just a nice word for murdered. Everyone on that list is gone. They shot him in front of me," Maya says miserably, her lip trembling. "No one could survive that."  
  
Well, Clarke could, but that's not important right now. At her side, Bellamy swears softly and hangs his head. Clarke reaches over and takes his head, warm and heavy in hers. She knows he was hoping they'd be able to achieve a happier ending for the missing cases people. Realistically it wasn't possible, but they're only human. They hoped.  
  
"What was the contract for?" Wells asks, his voice gentle and reassuring as always.  
  
"To make me promise I wouldn't tell anyone what I know," Maya says. "Please - I don't want to die."  
  
"We're not going to let anyone hurt you," Clarke says, and she means every word of it. The conviction in her voice must reach Maya, because the woman slowly loosens her iron grip on the chair and walks around it, sitting down nervously. She nods, and Octavia's eyes blaze with fierce determination.  
  
"What do you want to know?"

 

 

 

As cool as it feels to shoot the men breaking into her apartment with robot-fired nerf bullets, they're not very effective. They do, however, cause just enough chaos that they give Wick time to slip through the kitchen window, rescue the wire cutters from the sink, and promptly topple back through the window with a scary impressive bruise forming on his temple.  
  
"Fuck," Raven swears as she hobbles to his side and turns him over. Wick blinks blearily and lets out a groan when she traces the purpling edges of the injury but his eyes are unfocused and he makes no move to get up. Raven's heart hammers in her chest like a jackhammer as she leaves him on the floor and returns to the suit standing up in lieu of a kitchen table.  
  
They've got to get out of here before Wallace's men (she has no doubt of their loyalties, knows the night Clarke's mask slipped must have led to this) start tearing the apartment building apart looking for them. Wick can't walk, and Raven can't carry him, she couldn't have before Murphy's bullet nearly snapped her spine and she certainly can't now.

But the suit can. So she finishes up the last minute adjustments with fingers that hardly tremble, and buckles herself in, strapping this makeshift armour around the broken bits of her body so tightly that she's not sure she'll be able to take herself out after this. No matter. They have to survive. With the suit whirring and creaking as an echo to her own movements, she picks Wick up - it's odd, feeling the weight of his body slumped against hers but not collapsing underneath it - and flees.

On the roof of another building several blocks away, in the shelter of an air conditioning unit, Raven digs her cell phone out of her pocket - an interesting accomplishment considering one of the suit's support beams half blocks her access to her pocket - and calls Clarke. There's no answer, and Raven paces back and forth listening to the dial tone. She can't even enjoy the ease of movement she has for the first time in months, because she knows if Clarke goes home, it's all over.

Raven can't let her best friend become the next body in the river. She calls once more, then, giving up, heaves Wick over her shoulder and leaps over the edge of the building, landing on the next one. And the next, and the next, until she's swinging down a fire escape and knocking on a familiar window she's only ever been on the other side of.

Jasper screams when he sees her crouched outside, looking for all in the world like a cyborg. Any other time, she might have grinned at that scream, so high-pitched and girlish. Now, she only motions furiously for him to open up his window, shoves a semi-conscious Wick inside, and tells him to lock his doors and tell no one she's come by.

"What's going on?" Jasper asks, his brown eyes blown wide from fear rather than drugs, for once. At the commotion, Monty enters his room, immediately going to Wick's side.  
  
"Some very bad people are after me and Clarke," Raven says grimly. "I'm going to try to find her before they do. Keep your head down. I don't think they'll connect you to us, at least, not just yet. If it all goes to shit and you see us on the news arrested or dead, promise me you'll get out of the city and take Wick with you. He's a good guy. None of you deserve to be dragged into this."  
  
"Mrs Green always takes us in," Jasper murmurs, his gaze flitting between her and Wick. "But, Raven-"  
  
"I have to go find Clarke," Raven says, shifting her weight backwards onto the fire escape.  
  
"Raven!" Monty calls. She looks back, just once. "Be careful," he says softly, eyes kind and worried.  
  
"Careful doesn't win any wars," Raven retorts, and then she swings herself back up the fire escape and onto the roof. Her feet drum a battle march against the concrete, powerful for the first time in too long. Raven is strong and angry and terrified, and Wallace has chosen the wrong fight. She's going to tear him and his cronies apart if anything happens to Clarke, or Monty and Jasper or all the others they have gathered in the webs of friendship. And at the end she'll rub salt into the wounds, for hurting Wick.  
  
Wallace might have more firepower but Raven isn't bringing a knife to the gunfight, she _is_ the knife and by god she's got a sharpened edge and viciousness between her teeth.

 

 

 

Funny, Clarke never set out to change the world. She enrolled in pre-med half because her mother wanted her to and she hadn't yet learned how to shake off the chains of expectation, half because she was genuinely interested in biology and chemistry and every variation between and half because she wanted to do good on an individual level.

She never dreamed of superheros or world peace or unattainable wishes, but then a phD student named Tsing had liked her enough to let her help out on her thesis work. Somehow the chemical formulas carefully written down in her notebook and an accidental spill in the lab resulted in a serum straight out of a comic book.

"We could revolutionize healthcare with this," Clarke had breathed in awe at the aftermath, watching petri dishes of artificial tissue mend itself right in front of her. "Lorelei, we could-"  
  
"There is no we-" Tsing had said coldly, flicking a syringe to get rid of air bubbles. "This is _my_ thesis. Hold still."  
  
Clarke doesn't remember what happened next, only that the injection burning through her veins was like a second birth, and it had made her stronger and faster and invincible in all the wrong ways but it had made Tsing rot from the inside out. Clarke burned entire binders of steadily recorded observations and reports in a park near the campus, watched years of Tsing's life go up in flames and felt only numb inside. The university wrote Tsing's death off as a freak accident, gave Clarke permission to write her exams a month later as if that made a difference.

She hadn't said a word to anybody, had preferred to pretend that night had never happened, until Wells had come to visit and they'd taken a stupid shortcut and a little girl's knife slipped between her ribs and there was no denying it anymore not after -

 

 

 

Seven years later Clarke feels like she's making a difference anyway, that even if it's not revolutionizing the whole world it's going to make a difference to the next little girl in an alleyway who's so desperate for a bite to eat that she'll cut to the bone. Weeding Wallace and his extensive crime network out of the city will make it just that little bit safer, just that little bit easier to heal.

As she steps off the bus two blocks down from her apartment she feels light and airy, unable to believe it's come to this.

Octavia's article will pack a punch that will leave Wallace Inc reeling in its wake, now that they have Maya's ironclad testimony. Wells will be there to dismantle the defenses Cage will no doubt try to hide behind. Bellamy and Miller and others in the precinct they trust will not be swayed by dirty money. In her mind's eye Clarke sees her mother's coffin dusted with snow and the too-bright flowers on top, not yet wilted. _This is for you, and for all the others_.

The blow to the back of her head as she's scrambling in her purse for her keys is entirely unexpected.

 

 

 

Bellamy more or less has a heart attack when Clarke's roommate shatters his window and dives in feet first, glass crinkling under her weight. She stands, wild eyed, a Frankenstein of flesh and metal. Behind him, Octavia slams the lid of her laptop and flicks her switchblade out.

"Put down the gun," Raven snaps, nodding at the pistol Bellamy's already got pointed at her.  
  
"Jesus," Bellamy mutters, clicking the safety back on and shoving the barrel in his waistband. Octavia follows his lead a moment later. "I thought you were some kind of cyborg assassin sent by Wallace. You better pay for my fucking window."  
  
"Shut up," Raven says. "Is Clarke with you?"  
  
"No," Octavia says as Bellamy shakes his head. Dread suddenly pools in his gut. "We all split up after we spoke with Maya, she said she wanted to go home and shower and I don't like having people hang around while I'm writing an article anyway."  
  
"Oh no," Raven breathes. "Oh no."

 

 

 

Across the city, Maya Vie pulls her scarf tighter around her neck as she waits for her turn at the crosswalk. It's cold and she wishes she had put a second pair of socks on this morning. She wriggles her toes in her boots, feels them stiff and numb with winter's chill. She's nearly home, and she thinks she's going to make pasta for dinner. She still cries every time she tastes her father's sauce recipe on her tongue, and she thinks that won't be stopping any time soon, but it'll be a little easier to look at his picture frame on the mantle tonight.

He'd be proud of her for what she did today, she thinks.

Maya's no hero, no one remarkable at all. But because she told Octavia Blake her story, bad things will stop happening to good people. There will be no more Vincent Vies torn out of lives too soon and too violently. No more children like her looking at the pictures on the mantles and wishing someone had done something to save them.

Maya's no hero. She's just a young woman who knew too much, dragged into a vicious game she had no chance of winning. The light turns green, and she steps off the curb to cross the street. She has no way of knowing about the sniper perched on the roof at her back. She's just an innocent.

A breeze blows, and she shivers and burrows tighter into her scarf. The sniper breathes in and holds it, pulls the trigger between heartbeats so the rifle doesn't jostle. Maya collapses forward on the street, blood and bone tangled in her dark hair. A stain spreads along the tear in her red hat, a shade darker than the surrounding wool. On the street corner, a woman lets out a hoarse, terrified scream, and a man hides his child's face in his coat, looking ashen at the body sprawled on the crosswalk. She was just an innocent. The sniper packs quickly, efficiently, doesn't look back until he reaches the drop point and Cage Wallace's men hand him a briefcase full of cash. He does this to pay off his brother's student loans.

Sirens wail, and then quiet as they pronounce the victim, aged twenty two, no living relations, dead upon arrival. They cover her with a white sheet, tie the intersection off with yellow tape, skirt around the red puddle. Such vivid colours for such a cold winter evening.

She was just an innocent. No hero, just a good person trying to do right by the world. Oh god, she was just an innocent, just an -

 

 

 

"Innocent!" Jasper insists, shaking his head at the tv. Monty says nothing, his face hidden in his hands. He rocks back and forth, a muffled sob escaping from between pale fingers, and Jasper's voice cracks when he repeats it. 

"That's not how they'll see it," Wick whispers weakly. He's stretched out along the length of Monty and Jasper's couch, an ice pack pressed to the swelling injury on his temple, dark purple and green and sickly yellow at the edges.  
  
On the television, they watch stern-faced policemen drag Clarke Griffin out of a cruiser. There is a scramble as newscasters scurry forward to get closer, speaking to the cameras over their shoulders, their voices pitched low and scandalous as they relay lies disguised as truth. Clarke's eyes are glazed and half-lidded, and there's crusted blood in her blonde hair. The policemen shove reporters out of the way and haul Clarke forward, she stumbles on the stone steps in front of the precinct and can't get up again, her hands handcuffed tightly behind her back.

"It's been suggested that the masked vigilante that's been trying to secretly defame Wallace Inc for _months_ is not only responsible for a string of assaults across the city, but also the explosion at Ark Convention Center that killed dozens of hospital personnel that were enjoying a holiday celebration. We have reason to believe the fatal shooting at Walden and Fifth Street just two hours ago is also connected to Griffin. CEO Cage Wallace has not given comment yet, but sources close to him suggest that he will be suing Griffin for damages-"

"Turn it off," Monty says, anguish evident in his voice. "Please."  
  
Jasper does, and in the absence of the newscaster's scandalized tone, the silence is deafening. 

 

 

 

It's a good thing she has earplugs because this baby is going to blow her hearing out. In the shadows of an alley, hidden behind a dumpster, Raven wraps duct tape around her newest creation. If they make it through this, she's keeping a permanent stash of fireworks back at the apartment. It's far too difficult to find a place that's selling them off-season.

She tears the end of the tape off with her teeth, presses it against cool metal with the pad of her thumb, and kisses the unlit wick. Her hands are shaking again, not with fear, but with anger.

 

 

 

Clarke is still reeling from the blow when the door opens and rough hands drag her out of the cruiser. She stumbles, her head swimming at the sight of camera flashes going off and the grating noise of reporters yelling her name. How do they know her name? How did they get here so fast? Why is she being paraded into the precinct by the front entrance, where everyone can see?

Cage Wallace.

She burns, both with the throbbing pain in the back of her head and fury. They were too late. All this work, all of Octavia's preparation, all their plans to strike Wallace and bring him down in a single, powerful blow, are all for naught.

She's shoved into an interrogation room by rough hands and her vision spins for a moment as the handcuffs are unlocked from behind her back and her wrists are fastened to the table.

"Do you know what you've done?"  
  
Clarke looks up slowly, seeing first two hands braced stiffly against the other side of the table, then a black uniform with a badge over the heart, then a scowling face she's seen on tv, always with a carefully contrived look when speaking of the tragic bodies found in the river.

"Do you?" she asks, voice hoarse. Shumway's frown deepens, if such a thing was possible, and from behind Clarke another person strikes her hard. She resists the urge to make a sound when her forehead slams against the table.  
  
"This isn't a game, Clarke Griffin," Shumway sneers. She hears him only dimly through the pounding of her pulse in her ears. "And if it is to you, I'm not interested in playing. You've given me a lot of problems over the last few months. I thought we'd seen the last of you when your activity died down last fall, but I guess you just couldn't keep your nose out of other people's business, could you? You should have died with your mother."  
  
"Fuck you," Clarke says, spitting tiny flecks of blood out on the table. She runs her tongue along the inside of her mouth and can already feel the flesh knitting itself back together where she bit down. Now if only the man behind her would take off his gloves the next time he hits her, and she could transfer the raging concussion she's got and be able to think straight. She wants to be completely lucid when she breaks Shumway's neck for daring to speak about her mother. She wants to remember this.  
  
"Enough bravado. Ridley, the bag?"  
  
"Here," the man behind Clarke says. She twists her head around to try to look at him, wincing at the strain it puts on her neck. Her ears hear the crinkle of plastic and her eyes see his hands spread wide, but her brain doesn't work fast enough to stop the bag from coming down around her head. Clarke tries to jab her elbows back, forgetting in her panic that her wrists are still handcuffed to the table, and hears violent pops in both of them. Ridley's arm loops underneath her chin, wrenching her face up, and she feels the edge of the bag dig into the softness of her throat when he bunches it up in his fists.

She thrashes desperately, throwing her head back and slamming it against Ridley's abdomen, but it only serves to make black spots appear on her vision when she jars the open wound on the back of her head. Through the building pressure in her lungs, the slip of plastic pressed against her open mouth as she silently screams, Shumway stands impassively and watches her.

Clarke's fighting grows weaker as her lungs burn for air, and she lets herself go limp, eyes fluttering shut. Ridley's arm relaxes just slightly around her throat, not much, not enough. Her body won't let her die, but the bag around her neck won't let her live, and it leaves her in a gasping limbo, dreading the passage of time.

"She's faking it," Shumway says, in a tone that's almost bored. "Don't be fooled, Ridley."  
  
The bag tightens around her throat again, and Clarke's mouth opens wide for air that isn't there. Somewhere, her mind is dimly aware of a loud boom outside the room. Through the increasing fuzziness at the edge of her vision, Clarke sees Shumway turn to the door in surprise, just in time to see it fly open and two black-cloaked figures knock the corrupt chief to the floor. When Ridley lets go of her Clarke slips off the chair, no long having the strength to sit upright. Only her wrists, still painfully fastened, keep her from collapsing entirely against cool tile.

And then there are warm hands tearing the bag away and cradling her cheeks, and Clarke instinctively flinches away even as she grows heady with the oxygen running into her mouth. Her rescuer reaches for her again, pulling her tightly against a broad chest, and Clarke only relaxes when she feels gloves on his hands.

"Fuck, Clarke," Bellamy murmurs in her ear, pressing a kiss to her hair. "Miller, can you get the handcuffs off?"  
  
There are more murmurs, then the cacophony of another loud, distant explosion and muffled shouting. Clarke barely hears it over the sound of sobbing. She doesn't realize its her sobbing until the handcuffs loosen around her wrists and Bellamy picks her up in his arms, still murmuring apologies and encouragements into her hair.

"I got you, Clarke, I got you, it's okay, I'm so sorry we weren't faster," he says, and Clarke's head lolls over his shoulder. Sharp overhead lights bite into her vision, here a moment and gone the next as Bellamy paces quickly down the hall. Then she feels cold air on her skin and the fluorescent lamps are traded for the soft glow of a streetlight.  
  
Her lips part and she lets out a quiet moan of protest as a car door opens and Bellamy lowers her into the darkened backseat. Octavia twists around in the backseat and looks her over, a fiercely protective look in her eyes. Her knuckles are stark white on the leather seat, even in the dim light.

Bellamy climbs in a moment later from the other side, carefully lifting her head up into his lap. It sends stabs of sharp pain through her head before his gloved hands threading through her hair soothes her. Then there is a thud outside the car, and Raven is standing in the frame of the open door, brown eyes blazing, soot marks all over her cheekbones.

"Raven," Clarke chokes out, her voice raw in her throat.  
  
"If you ever scare me like this again, Griffin, I'm killing you myself," Raven says, but the hard line of her eyes quivers and then melts with concerned warmth. She reaches out a gloved hand to stroke Clarke's cheek and that's when Clarke sees the metal exoskeleton running up her arm. _Raven built it_ , she thinks, and almost wants to laugh. _She actually managed to build it._  
  
"Sorry to cut the goodbye short, but there's not much time left," Octavia warns. "We have to go now if we want to make it out of the city before they raise blockades."  
  
"Right, got it," Raven says, ducking out of the car, one hand braced against the roof. "I'll stick around and cause some more chaos. I have three boys I need to smuggle out to you in a few days, they'll be able to help you set up new identities too. Be safe."  
  
"Raven," Clarke whispers again, extending a shaky hand out. Raven clasps it and squeezes tightly, giving her a watery smile.  
  
"I'm right behind you," she promises. "But it's my turn to play the hero for a bit, okay?"  
  
And then she is gone and the car is moving, and Clarke knows this only because pain shoots through her head every time the tires hit a bump in the road and because the yellow flash of streetlights blinds her as they pass overhead. She's still in a daze when Bellamy starts peeling off his gloves, one finger at a time.

"Sleep, Clarke," Bellamy says, his bare knuckles brushing her cheek. They both shiver at the contact, as her injuries start to melt over to him. She tries to protest, but the streetlights flash into her eyes one more time and then they close and she drifts into darkness. "I'll wake you - "

 

 

  
  
" - up at the next stop," Bellamy says three weeks later, eyes fixed on the patch of road ahead illuminated by their headlights. He's wearing sunglasses even though it's dark out because the bruises he took from Clarke still haven't faded entirely, and he hates that she winces at every glimpse of the purple shadows across his cheekbones.

"Pull over now," Clarke says gently, reaching a hand over and laying it on his wrist. His eyebrows furrow deeper together. "There's still another two hours to go until the next motel, you should take the opportunity to sleep."  
  
He says nothing.  
  
"Please, Bellamy," Clarke says, her voice quiet so she doesn't wake the others in the backseat.  
  
A sign advertising a highway rest stop flashes past, and with a long suffering sigh, Bellamy pulls over and unlatches his seatbelt. Clarke ducks out of the passenger seat quickly, moves to block his way when he tries to walk past her. He's stiff when she wraps her arms tightly around his waist.

"I'm sorry I dragged you and Octavia into this mess," she whispers, voice muffled by the material of his shirt, pressed against her cheek. Slowly, his arms return the embrace.  
  
"If I remember correctly, you didn't," Bellamy says, and when he leans his head against hers Clarke feels herself melt against him. The last three weeks they've been on the run from Wallace's mercenaries, aided by Monty's fake IDs and an impressive amount of cash that Clarke's pretty sure Jasper got selling drugs, and Bellamy's been tense and overprotective every minute of them. "Octavia would be dead without you."

Clarke sighs.  
  
"We're going to ruin him," she promises. "For ever laying a hand on the people we love."  
  
His arms tighten around her.  
  
"Clarke - "

 

 

 

" - Clarke, Clarke, look at this!" Octavia all but yells, throwing herself onto Clarke's hotel bed with such fervor that Clarke feels the mattress shift underneath them.  
  
"Good news?" Clarke says dryly, hardly daring to hope as she looks at the laptop screen Octavia's angling towards her. Her heart drops into her stomach and she thinks she might faint.  
  
"I posted it an hour ago and it's got 18 000 views already," Octavia rambles, her fingertips drumming out an anxious beat against the laptop's case. "Fuck my editor, he said journalistic blogging was never going to take off. I bet he wishes he had listened to me when I said I had a story. Whiny, arrogant little bugger."  
  
"It's happening?" Lincoln asks, coming around the side of the bed so he can see too.  
  
"It's happening," Clarke murmurs as Octavia refreshes the page and there's another two hundred views on the article she's spent entire weeks writing, painstakingly triple-checking every reference and linking evidence together.  
  
"There's no way the news won't be talking about this in the morning," Octavia mutters, all but pulling her hair out. "Cage owns a shit ton of the media, but not all of them, not enough to bury this. Clarke, Clarke we _did_ it!"

 

 

 

Bellamy finds her sitting on the curb at the edge of the parking lot, a cooling cup of coffee in hand. He says nothing at first when he sits next to her, stretching his long legs out against concrete. The sun is just starting to rise. Morning news is already in full swing. Clarke can't bear to watch it, can't bear to see the outcome of the battle she's thrown herself into for over two years.

A good part of her is terrified that if they really do bring down Cage, there won't be anything left for her. She's just a husk of a girl, everything important burned away when Tsing stabbed a syringe into her arm and made pain roll off her skin like raindrops on a window.

Only the firm warmth of Bellamy's thigh pressed against hers grounds her, makes Clarke dare to hope that after all this, there will be something good left.  
  
"We're going home, Clarke," Bellamy whispers after a long time, either ten minutes or an hour or several of them.

Clarke squints at the pink sky, at a sun just reborn, at the long shadows cast across the parking lot that are getting shorter and shorter each minute. It feels good to feel sunlight on her cheeks again. She's been living in the dark for a long time.

She reaches for Bellamy's hand, and he laces his fingers through hers, and they wait for justice to do its part.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This monster of a oneshot was written bit by bit over a period of about a month and a half so if it's super choppy... That's why. There were originally going to be more scenes - lots of Raven kicking ass with her new supersuit, Miller and Bellamy doing more cop stuff that isn't just in the background, more on-the-run-from-the-law roadtripping, but then I got to 23k and didn't want to write anymore. #yolo.  
> I know there have already been some Bellarke superhero thingamabobs floating around and other people have given Clarke healing-y superpowers, but I hope I put an original spin on it. If anyone's wondering why Raven's paralysis doesn't transfer when they touch, my explanation is that it only works on recent injuries.  
> Also, for some reason Kane owns a church in like, 67% of my modern AUs. Did a little research, the Philippines are quite Catholic but I headcanon Bellamy as not religious anyway. He just wanted someone to talk to.   
> Sorry for being long-winded, thanks for reading, comments are life.


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